


No Nails AU stories

by purplekitte



Category: Horus Heresy - Various Authors, Warhammer 40.000
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Domestic Fluff, Multi, PWP, Psychic Abilities, Twincest, split personality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-03
Updated: 2019-01-19
Packaged: 2019-09-14 10:14:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 27
Words: 37,831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16911045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/purplekitte/pseuds/purplekitte
Summary: Collection of side stories for my friend absurdfact's No Nails AU





	1. Guilliman/Curze PWP

**Author's Note:**

> For very brief context: this is an AU where Angron never got the Butcher's Nails, and he and Guilliman get fed up and run off from the Imperium because it's morally bankrupt, and among other things Guilliman and Curze end up dating

Konrad had never in his life seen anything hotter than Roboute Guilliman breathless as he methodically worked fingers inside himself.

He wanted to touch, he really did, but Roboute was always so careful with him and he didn't know how to be the same. He said he didn't care when Konrad clawed at his back in his excitement or bit hard enough to draw blood, it was nothing compared to battle wounds and they were hardly of note. His actions, though... He treated Konrad so delicately all the time, asking if he was alright, stopping at any hint of pain or discomfort. Konrad now had one model of how things should be, but he didn't trust himself to be like that. Like patient, kind, conscientious, meticulous Roboute.

Roboute's eyes were on him, watching Konrad watch him. He didn't really understand how to go about displaying himself lewdly, but that was fine because Konrad found him attractive all the time anyway. He liked Roboute's unadorned solidity and honesty and the way his composure fell apart when they touched. He liked to think about Roboute thinking about him as he touched himself.

"Come over here." Konrad complied and Roboute removed his fingers from himself to wrap both arms around him and kiss him messily. "I'm ready."

If Roboute had been the one fucking Konrad, he'd have insisted on much longer preparation, he thought. It rankled a little, but he couldn't decide on why. He wasn't weak, he didn't need coddling, but at the same time the concern made him feel warm and dizzy when it was being lavished on him and he knew perfectly well the eagerness bordering on pain to have his lover inside him already.

Those thoughts were chased from his mind entirely as Roboute's slick hand wrapped around his cock, coating the sensitive flesh and guiding him inside. Konrad hissed and shuddered at how good he felt, hot and strong around him, and it was almost too much when Roboute gasped too and held him against his chest even tighter.

He still couldn't quite believe it, that all he had to say was "I want to fuck you" and hardly any time later he'd have the great Roboute Guilliman naked and spreading his legs for him. Roboute was so careful establishing what Konrad's limits were, but he didn't know the reverse back and didn't want to push too far. Roboute always seemed to enjoy whatever they were doing, but maybe he just wanted to do it for Konrad's sake, not because he actually liked it. He was the one with all the problems and all the hang-ups, but Roboute never told him no and that scared him sometimes. He wanted to shake him and say Don't you know you're going to be taken advantage of? Never give anything away for free, you gullible fool.

But Roboute was clenching around him and hard against his stomach and Konrad couldn't resist leaning his hands against his shoulders and thrusting hard and fast down into him. Roboute adjusted his hips to take him deeper and pushed back. He whispered encouragements in Konrad's ear, "Good" and "Like that" and sometimes he tried to say more but was cut off by his own moans.

Konrad loved to see him like this. Sweaty and wanton, but he was smiling that small, sweet smile around gasps for air and the hands stroking his back were still gentle. Roboute whimpered as he wrapped a hand around his cock and stroked down his length.

Konrad never managed a steady rhythm when fucking him, but his movements grew even more erratic as he got close. Roboute was losing control too, moving against him without conscious thought and shuddering around him and the little sounds he made. Konrad cried out as he came and grinned as Roboute groaned low and came in his hand a moment later.

Konrad would have been content to collapse in a sticky mess where they were, but Roboute had his strange views of domesticity that involved bed sheets and blankets even when it wasn't cold (not too tight, nothing that would pin his arms down if he wanted to get away) and pressing kisses to his forehead. It was, Konrad had to admit when Roboute lay down next to him and he could nuzzle his nose against him to smell the lingering sweat and sex on his skin, alright too.


	2. Sevatar/Thiel outline

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> an outline more than prose, for a pairing I decided I shipped in this AU one day while avoiding writing really boring propensity score code

Sevatar wants to make it work. He doesn’t necessarily like or trust Guilliman, but he acknowledges he’s the best thing that’s ever happened to his primarch. The rebellion, the therapy, the relationship. Sev’s not very good at understanding what he’s feeling or why, but he definitely has strong emotions that this has been a good thing.

Most of the Night Lords think he’s in a bad mood because the Legion keeps having to hold back and he’s taking it out on them if it ever looks like they’re having fun. No, he really wants this to work and is coming down hard on anyone he sees as threatening the cohesion of the alliance. He doesn’t care about what anyone thinks about his reasons. Honestly, even if someone figured him out, they’d probably dismiss as unlikely just how idealistic and romantic he is where his primarch is concerned.

Meanwhile, he’s taken to smiling a lot, which just scares the bejegus out of everyone.

Sevatar meets Aeonid Thiel because Thiel managed to start a brawl with the Atramentar and Sev got called in to give everyone involved a dressing down. He decides Thiel’s interesting, for an Ultramarine, and much less beat up than he by all rights should have been.

What follows... Thiel’s not entirely sure why any of this is happening to him, but he interprets the gifts of flayed rats and skulls and stuff he’s started getting as Sevatar planning to kill him and letting him know so he can stew in it for a while. Thiel isn’t looking forward to his soon-to-be grisly demise, but he’s not able to feel fear so he’s mostly feeling annoyance he can’t think of a way out of the situation. He doesn’t think he can beat the First Captain in a fight, he’s not sneakier than a Night Lord, no one from his Legion likes him enough that them caring if he lives or dies works as a deterrent, and he’s perpetually in so much trouble that his transfer requests keep getting turned down on principle even when he asks for unglamorous posts very far from here.

So he basically decides to spend his last few days alive settling his affairs, which consists of giving away his maybe three personal possessions to his maybe three friends and starting even more fights than usual by telling people exactly what he thinks of them because why not?

Meanwhile, Sevatar doesn’t understand what he’s doing either. He figures he’s trolling because Thiel’s face and reactions amuse him. He also hasn’t actually followed Thiel’s train of thought and assumptions. Tovac and Sheng eventually have to explain to him he’s clearly flirting.

Sevatar thinks, _Oh. I guess I do want to fuck him._ So he does. Thiel is initially extremely confused, but once he figures out what’s going on he starts narrating a nature documentary in his head about courtship rituals and mating habits of Night Lords outside their natural environment.

They actually get along pretty well once Thiel realises Sevatar never gets upset whatever he says on any subject whatsoever except his primarch (which Thiel hasn’t tried because he figures he should have some self-preservation instinct). Actually, he finds it hilarious and would spend hours just listening to the insightful train wreck that is Thiel talking. Thiel kind of wants to like Sevatar, but can’t because the sorts of things the Night Lords do go against his principles and this matters to him, and he’s still pretty sure Sevatar’s going to kill him someday. They still hang out and spar and screw.

There’s less gossip about this than there might be considering a First Captain’s involved. Most of the people who’ve noticed and figured out what’s going on have been Night Lords and they keep instantly dismissing it as _Sevatar wanted a new pet_. No one takes Thiel seriously, except Sevatar, who actually thinks this guy’s good, if only his Legion appreciated him he wouldn’t be just some sergeant.

Thiel would be very uncomfortable with the idea of being in a relationship, so he doesn’t think they are, but he likes the sex and finds it pretty funny how the Ultramarines who have noticed obviously want to forbid this, but no, it is most definitely not against regulations to be sleeping with one of the Night Lords. Not that they could very well stop Sevatar if they tried, but they could at least file a strongly worded letter of complaint.

Sevatar gets Thiel to paint his gauntlets red as well as his helmet. Thiel manages to break his nose when he eventually finds out exactly what this means because Sevatar’s laughing too hard to dodge. Somehow this ends up making his life easier: Thiel keeps getting sent by other Ultramarines to do all the liaising with the Night Lords, and the other Night Lords mess with him less because Sevatar’s claimed him and threatening him too much/carrying out any of those threats might be seen as a personal challenge to the First Captain’s authority which no one wants to make.

Eventually Guilliman hears about this and sits Thiel down to give him a lecture about safe and responsible sex. Thiel thinks this is the most embarrassing things that’s ever happened to him or ever will. He is proven wrong soon after when Guilliman decides this is inefficient and gives the talk to Sevatar.


	3. Additional facts+PWP ficlet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sevatar/Thiel, background Guilliman/Curze [NC-17]

1\. Sevatar tricked him into wearing sinner’s red gauntlets, but he’s one of the few people who doesn’t think Thiel’s a failure. A gullible idiot, sure. Mostly it was his way of saying that Thiel’s life belongs to him and gods help anyone who tries to steal his prey. Which is his roundabout way of not saying he cares.

1a. Embarrassing though it may have been, being lectured by Guilliman was also very comforting for Thiel, because it means his father knows who he is and cares about his welfare. He’s not used to that.

2.a. They have pretty rough sex. “Ranging from mostly consensual to consensual” is about the best you can say abut it. They’re really not taking after their primarchs in this AU.

b. They experiment a lot because neither of them really cares about hurting the other. If one of them really doesn’t like something, they’ll let the other one know immediately, with violence.

c. Sevatar had a lot more experience when they started, but Thiel learns fast. He probably wasn’t a virgin beforehand, because if there ever was an Ultramarine who might not have been, but he hadn’t done it much and certainly had never had a long-term thing with anyone.

d. Sevatar’s always in charge of the situation, but he’s indifferent to questions about who’s on top.

e. Sev likes hurting him and Thiel’s not nearly masochistic enough to appreciate this so he’s taken to punching him back when he gets too rough (I have these mental images of Thiel whapping Sevatar with a rolled-up newspaper). Sevatar’s never _seriously_ hurt/tortured him though, so he can barely see what the fuss is about. He has both the usual rather fucked up Nostraman view of sex and a masochistic streak himself, so he’s further confused.

3\. Curze may or may not have noticed any of this and certainly doesn’t care. Of all the things his sons do, this is so far down the list into mostly-acceptable. But if Sevatar genuinely pissed off Guilliman, like by actually killing Thiel, Curze would get angry too.

4\. Thiel is writing a book about the Night Lords. It is factually accurate and more insightful as to why they behave in certain ways than most of them are consciously aware of, but very tongue-in-cheek at the same time. Some of his brothers disapprove of such frivolity, some have so little sense of humour they didn’t notice.

5\. Thiel and Malcharion hang out too and talk about tactics and books. Sevatar acted like it was an insult that the two of them would like each other when he introduced them, but mostly he just believed it was true and was right. Thiel managed to introduce Vandred and Lotara Sarrin accidentally and they hit it off and have been constantly doing-the-space-equivalent-of-texting-each-other about void warfare ever since.

6\. Thiel’s picked up a bunch of Sevatar’s speech pattern, like a tendency to refer to other primarchs as his uncles and Astartes from other Legions as “the cousins.” Sevatar sometimes finds himself thinking about practicals and theoreticals before reminding himself he neither knows or cares about tactics and acts on the spur of the moment anyway.

7\. At first Thiel thought Sevatar just didn’t sleep in front of him, which isn’t unreasonable because he’s a paranoid bastard and they’re not that cuddly. Eventually he found out that Sevatar just doesn’t sleep. Sevatar is still unaware that Thiel instantly saw through him and figured out the why’s and that he’s a repressed psyker and all, because Ultramarines are really, really good at putting clues together. Thiel’s trying to figure out a way to get Sev to agree to get therapy, or to arrange for someone else to force him into it without him tracing it back to Thiel. He doesn’t think Sevatar would kill him just for knowing his secret, but he probably would on principle if he started spreading it around or forcing his hand with it. Anyway, therapy seems to be helping Lord Curze, so maybe the Crimson King could fix the Prince of Crows too.

8\. smut fic bit, with maybe 50% less snark than I might have hoped for:

Thiel managed not to jump when Sevatar’s arms went around him suddenly. That almost made up for the disappointment that he hadn’t heard him come in, but he was lucky when he could at the best of times and with the water on he hadn’t had a chance.

‘I started to wonder if you’d drown.’

‘Just enjoying using your water ration instead of mine.’ He didn’t even feel guilty about it, though his long-engrained instincts had been indicating their confusion to his conscious mind ever since he’d passed the three minute mark.

‘Why would water be rationed?’ Sevatar had a way of making everything sound like an insult to his intelligence, but Thiel had come to realise he was also genuinely confused much of the time. ‘We’re in the most resource-rich part of the galaxy and ship recycling systems are very efficient.’

‘Sometimes you can preventatively avoid problems rather than dealing with them as they happen.’

‘You just like showing off your professionalism by making your lives less conformable.’

‘I’m pretty sure that’s the Imperial Fists. Admittedly, I suppose not enough of your lot bathe for it to make a difference.’

‘I can always use you as bait if I need to give out incentives.’ Sevatar pressed his erection against his back and pushed him so they were both getting as much of the water as possible.

‘On second thought, the smell doesn’t bother me that much.’

It helped that the shower was tiny, for Space Marines, even in the First Captain’s quarters, so Thiel could at least brace himself even if the walls and his hands were slippery. Sevatar was not helping by pressing his whole weight against him. ‘Last long enough and I’ll suck you off after,’ Sevatar promised as he removed his soapy fingers and pushed inside him.

At least that saved him the trouble of taking a hand away from keeping his balance to get himself off (if only he could mag-lock his boots to the floor). Sevatar lied a lot, but he usually believed in reciprocity. And he could always finish himself off later if the Night Lord lost interest.

Sevatar found a good angle and soon Thiel was pressing back against his thrusts while trying not to slip, the water a change to how the friction between their bodies usually felt. He had to admit Sevatar filling him felt wonderful, hot and solid and slick, even when he wasn’t teasing and playing his body like he sometimes did. He came with a groan that made Thiel shudder too.

Sevatar turned him around and kissed him briefly and sloppily before leaning down to lick drops of water from his neck. It was never reassuring to have an unstable murderer that close to his jugular, but nothing worse happened than the brush of teeth against tender skin and some new hickies his enhanced biology would hopefully hide before anyone else saw them.

‘We are going to run out of water at this rate.’

It was hard to tell Sevatar’s exact expression in the dark, he didn’t walk into walls by any means but he was at a distinct disadvantage for details, but it seemed to be his favourite smug one. ‘I said if you last long enough.’

‘I’m going to get bored first--’ he started to say, but Sevatar chose that moment to shove him back against the wall and the cold of the tile was a shock with the water still running hot. Thiel shook his head as he adjusted for the water pouring down his face from the opposite direction. (Extra, clear eyelids like crocodiles, why didn’t Space Marines have those?)

Sevatar licked his way down his body teasingly, tracing drops of water across the contours of his chest. Thiel thrust his hips hoping for some friction already. Sevatar eventually dropped to his knees, but still didn’t touch his cock, instead playfully sucking on the skin of his wrist and knuckles of one hand before taking a finger into his mouth and sucking all the moisture from it.

‘Sev,’ he groaned in annoyance. Sevatar liked his hands way too much. His cock was aching already, then he did that thing with his tongue and Thiel whimpered. The brush of water pouring down him tickled everywhere but it wasn’t nearly enough. ‘Sev!’

Definitely smirking. ‘Expecting someone else?’ Teeth grazed his knuckles.

‘Hurry up already if you’re going to do it.’ He tangled a hand in Sevatar’s hair and tugged harder than he usually would, mostly squeezing water out of the soggy mess. Sevatar hummed in approval and finally licked down his cock.

‘Fuck,’ he groaned as Sevatar lapped the drips of water and fluids from the tip of his cock and sucked messily when Thiel thrust past his lips. Sevatar didn’t make any effort to keep his hips in place, just moving his head with it and taking him all down. Damn he was good at this, and he should probably be grateful he treated getting Thiel off as one of the goals in whatever game he was playing. Thiel bucked helplessly into his mouth as Sevatar sucked him.

He wasn’t going to last long and didn’t try, just scrambling for purchase against a wall, and then giving up and fisting both hands in Sevatar’s long hair. The Night Lord moaned around him and it was all too much. He couldn’t think of anything other than the heat and the wet and how good this felt as he came.

Sevatar pulled away slowly, licking away come and water as the shower washed them clean again. He was gorgeous like a shadow leopard from his homeworld--dark and wild and dangerous. Thiel brushed away all the straggly strands of hair that had gotten plastered on his face and brought him up into an open-mouthed kiss, tasting himself on his tongue.

‘I wonder how long your third lung would work if I held you under water,’ Sevatar mused.

‘I’m not letting you drown me for science.’

‘Why would it be for science? You’re the one who would take notes.’

Good to know some things would never change. ‘Do you need instructions on the shampoo bottle for how to wash your hair? Wash it out properly so it stops being stringy and greasy. Little girls are better at this than you.’

Sevatar turned away and leaned his head back against Thiel’s shoulder and left it there in a clear _If you care, do the work yourself._ Thiel reached for more shampoo and wondered he’d ever get used to Ultramarine barracks showers again.


	4. Date Night

‘I’m not unfamiliar with the concept,’ Konrad grumbled, ‘they’re shiny things with sex and explosions.’

The state of the Nostraman film industry was somehow not a surprise. ‘So you never bothered.’ Roboute wasn’t exactly prone to himself. They were too time-consuming for the payoff, as far as he was usually concerned, at least unless he was doing a dozen other things at the same time. He knew quite a bit about the cultural impact of cinema, but hadn’t actually seen many movies. It was a common component of courtship rituals on most planets where it existed though, or so he had heard.

‘Sometimes they’d throw out the last of the stale popcorn out back and I would lick up the grease until I was sick.’

From Konrad, he wasn’t entirely sure if that was a bad memory or a fond one. ‘We have a lot of food here.’

‘Mmm,’ Konrad replied, sticking a meat bun in his mouth whole. But he curled up on the edge of the couch and let Roboute sit next to him and eventually let him put an arm around his shoulders when he asked.


	5. Genderswapped Guilliman/Curze

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Extremely typical No Nails AU Guilliman/Curze fluff-PWP. Except genderswapped.

Robin was in the plaid button-down and jeans she preferred when she didn’t feel she had to spend every second being the regal and dignified warrior-queen of Macragge done up as to befit her station. She looked even less feminine than usual, but Josefine never cared much one way or another. She could definitely never have a relationship with a man, her reflexes from Nostromo were too strong, but she had certainly killed women too. Robin was safe because she was her. Her blonde braid was loose and trailing over her shoulder instead of pinned up around her head, and Josefine was tempted to tug it.

Instead, she sat down on the far end of the couch and stared at her. Watching her work and have that slight line of concentration between her eyes never stopped being something Josefine wanted to do. She also liked the way Robin smiled when she walked into her study or the way the faint sound of her heartsbeat jumping for a moment before settling again, though those acknowledgments made her own hearts skip disconcertingly.

‘Not on the couch,’ Robin muttered absently without seeming to look up from her dataslate. Admittedly, figuring out Josefine was about to put her bare feet on the couch was a pretty easy guess from hearing and experience.

She had started out the day with slippers, she recalled, but had dropped them off a roof when they annoyed her. ‘They’re feet. So what if they’re dirty? That’s what they’re for.’

She wouldn’t have even noticed before. Admittedly it would have been the least of things back then. Robin and Magda were such bad (good) influences that she kept being badgered into bathing and clean clothes with no tears and brushing her hair until it was smooth and untangled. She barely looked like herself.

(She dreamed she would look in the mirror and see long, dark, tangles and blood on pale skin hidden beneath them and a slasher smile. That was the monster, and Josefine wasn’t the monster, she was in control and the one caging it away, she was the one Robin wanted because she didn’t understand what she really was.)

‘That’s also what shoes are for. You don’t have to track dirt on the carpet either.’

Josefine shrugged. She didn’t understand Robin being a neat-freak in the slightest, but she found it much more cute than annoying.

Slowly she made her way closer. Crept closer, like she was circling her prey but didn’t want it to dart yet. She liked watching Robin, liked listening to her breathe, liked the clean soap smell when it was coming from her. She wanted to touch. She wanted so much it took her sister putting her dataslate down on a table to notice she had already half-crawled onto her lap.

Robin ran a hand over her hair, gently finger-combing a few wild strands to lie flat, before kissing her softly. Josefine surged up into the kiss, holding her tightly and biting at her lips.

‘Shh. Calm down. I’m not going anywhere,’ she whispered with light, soothing touches to Josefine’s face and hair. Josefine just wanted her already, but she loved how considerate Robin always was at the same time.

Robin slowly moved her hands down to her shoulders, careful not to touch her neck too much, and rested them there lightly. ‘May I?’

‘Yes.’ Do it. Please, but she didn’t like that word. Instead, Josefine reached down to the hem of her midnight blue dress and pulled it over her head in one motion. She wasn’t wearing anything under it, unlike Robin who had so many annoying layers to get off her.

It wasn’t like she needed a bra. Chronic malnutrition hadn’t left Josefine with the fat stores to be anything but flat; while Robin wasn’t particularly voluptuous compared to some of their sisters, in keeping with her height and broad shoulders, her breasts would be full and heavy in Josefine’s hands when she cupped them. For now she put her head on Robin’s chest, wanting to touch her but vaguely aware she was getting in the way of her unbuttoning her shirt.

Robin worked around her one-handed enough to get her shirt open and let her keep her head where it was resting. Her other hand slowly stroked Josefine’s arm, eventually moving to its edge but not quite touching her body. ‘Okay?’

Josefine nodded against her chest, enjoying the softness over hard muscle there. Robin spread her palm across her breast and ran her thumb over the soft skin of her nipple. She squeaked and tensed all the way down to her toes for a moment, but in a good way. She leaned into it and pulled her entire body up to be lying across her lover.

Robin reached around with her other arm to steady her and rested her hand on her lower back. She wasn’t at the greatest angle for leverage for running away, but it wasn’t like she wanted to nor did she feel trapped. She wanted to press against Robin’s chest and feel her warmth and smooth old battle scars and the way their bodies fit together. She wanted to touch her everywhere but she was too clumsy and uncontrolled with anything that didn’t involve killing to be comfortable expressing herself that way. She could just rest her chin on Robin’s only-partially-unhooked bra and let Robin touch her.

Her nipples peaked under the touch, while Robin traced up and down her spine. Josefine sighed into her skin and rubbed against her leg a little. She really should get those trousers off her to feel if she was wet too, but the friction against rough denim was also nice. By the way her hips were bucking slightly under her, she knew Robin was turned on too and she moaned appreciatively when Josefine moved the knee between her legs higher.

Robin kissed her hair and moved a hand to her waist. ‘Josefine?’

‘Touch me already.’ Why did she ever, ever stop?

Robin moved so slowly that Josefine would have sworn she was teasing if she hadn’t known she was just so earnestly careful all the time, but she stopped caring entirely when her fingers pressed between her legs.

She moaned when Robin brushed against her sensitive clit and lifted her hips to give her more access. Her fingertips quickly became slick from how wet Josefine was, her exploration firm but soft. Her other hand continued to move across Josefine’s chest, making her tingle and squirm everywhere and arch her back.

She rubbed lightly over Josefine’s folds first, giving her plenty of warning in case she decided to squirm away instead of towards her touch, before pressing the tip of a finger inside her and stroking there. Josefine gasped and bucked against her, wet and throbbing within. More, more, more.

Robin gasped when she bit at her. She really should return the favour and touch back, but she was too distracted. She could give her her full attention later, lean down between her legs and taste her, when she wasn’t so lost and needy. It felt like Robin should be getting more from her, but she never complained, so Josefine figured that must be okay enough. Certainly she seemed to like it when Josefine did manage to touch her or got out the sex toys to fuck her with. Robin never returned the favour. Josefine didn’t like penetrative sex, didn’t like anything other than Robin’s fingers or tongue inside her, but Robin had found more than enough things that she did like from her research.

Josefine’s hips jerked helplessly as Robin found an angle to curl her fingers and stroke within her while rubbing at her clit with the back of her knuckles.

She could hear herself whimpering, her gasps and cries as heat built within her and pleasure crashed over her in waves. Robin kept touching her through her peak until all but the last shockwaves were out of her system and she could breathe again.

Josefine wrapped her arms around her tightly and leaned up to kiss her messily. ‘Should I...?’

‘If you want to.’ Her blue eyes were dark with arousal, but she never wanted to push or come on too strong if it would make her uncomfortable, as if Josefine wasn’t desperate for her back.

‘Here?’

‘We could go to the bed, but we don’t have to.’

‘Your couch is going to get dirty,’ she said against Robin’s stomach, trying to get her shirt and bra all the way off her shoulders and her jeans undone.

‘That’s fine,’ she said before being cut off by a gasp as Josefine licked lower, grabbing onto the back of the couch to brace herself rather than pull Josefine’s hair. ‘Just fine.’


	6. Peace Talks

So, there have been meetings between the loyalists and the secessionists so far and we know Horus, Fulgrim, and Curze were there and Sanguinius wasn’t, among other people.

I have this very clear mental image of Horus watching Guilliman watch Curze. And he’s thinking: of course he’s watching him to make sure he doesn’t suddenly go crazy and try to bite someone’s face off. Why was he even invited to this when everyone’s trying hard not to start trouble and break this unsteady cold war? He looks better, but you can never be too sure, of course Guilliman doesn’t trust him.

Then he catches... not even them stealing a kiss. Just a brush of their hands or something only for a moment. Konrad smiles, a smile he’s never seen before. Roboute smiles back.

Fuck, Horus thinks. He’s been reading their subtext entirely wrong. That’s not suspicion. He’s not just condemning the Imperium for never doing anything to help Konrad out because of honour or abstract moral indignation. That’s the radiant look someone gets when someone they love walks in the room and they can’t look away even though they’re supposed to be doing other things. They’re so happy to be near each other.

And Horus thinks, How can he ever forgive us?


	7. Guilliman and Angron send out invitations to the treason party

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Angron, Guilliman, Curze, Vulkan, Magnus [PG]

Guilliman looked like he had a long speech planned to lay everything out, all his evidence and reasons, and only eventually get to his point. Angron pre-emptively announced, ‘We’re going to commit treason and succeed from the Imperium with all of Ultramar. Do you want to come along?’

Surprising Magnus was a rare experience, and Angron intended to savour it. Also Guilliman coming close to losing his temper. ‘Damn it, Angron, we’re not inviting them to go drinking with you.’

What Curze thought, Angron couldn’t tell. He’d heard second-hand what Guilliman and Magnus had learned, but he hadn’t seen much of him himself. Hadn’t liked most of it over the years, had heard things as bad as he did about Russ or worse, but Guilliman had been insistent. Angron had agreed in the end. No matter who they were and what they’d done, not one deserved abuse by those who should care for them and no one should be left to be victimised when you knew they needed help.

Vulkan looked surprised too, but like he was reserving judgement because of his friendship with Angron and Guilliman. ‘Roboute, if you would start over from the beginning? What do you two mean by that?’

Guilliman took a deep breath, pleased to be back on track. He probably had made a whole mental agenda and timetable to go through. ‘For a long time we’ve been going along with the Imperium. If we fought how we felt best, then we could feel we were doing right and ignore everything going around us as outside our control. We’re primarchs. We can’t do that.

‘The problem is not a single campaign gone wrong, a disagreement about acceptable tactics. It is the foundation upon which the Great Crusade and the Imperium are built. All must submit. Peacefully if possible, but by any means necessary. All must be for us, or they must die. Not everyone tries, even if we do. Any slight or moment of hesitation or deviance from our values can be seen as a declaration of being against us, making those giving it acceptable targets. This is allowed, with only the integrity and personal values of the commander of an expeditionary fleet holding it in check, because the only commandment of the Crusade is conquer all. Our iterators reassure us that whatever we do is right and just and necessary for the good of mankind.’

‘Why not reform from within?’ asked Vulkan. ‘A civil war will make everything worse. The Imperium will bleed itself dry to destroy you, and send army after army to your door. We already have positions of authority here.’

‘How much has any of us accomplished?’ Angron asked. ‘Changing anyone else’s mind? That which serves the Imperium is allowed. Subversive statements that question the righteousness of conquest are cracked down everywhere. We might not have figured out how to govern our holdings, but we certainly have a well-oiled propaganda machine. Tools are not supposed to question the hand that uses them or the institution around them.’

‘What about Father?’ asked Magnus, with a glance between Curze and Guilliman. Angron knew that while he wasn’t as preoccupied with social justice as his other brothers here were, he had his own long-standing points of contention with the Imperium’s policies on psykers. Angron had spent enough time talking Magnus down from his most extreme recklessness to know there was danger and he needed watched by someone responsible, but he never doubted Magnus’s good intentions for the improvement of humanity. It was Angron or Lorgar who did that, kept tabs of Magnus and made sure he didn’t get in trouble because they cared. Their father just forbid things, and he had to know that would never stop him, and it left him with fewer people to turn to when he needed help.

Guilliman glanced at Curze too, but he started his story earlier. The Thunder Warriors. The way they’d been made, the way they’d been used, the way they’d been purged, and the possible logic underlying that. It didn’t sound right, it didn’t sound like anything that _should have_ happened, but Guilliman related it all with the simple finality of the historical fact it was.

They understood what it meant, how it fit with other facts they knew and things that had happened. Everyone kept stealing glances at Curze as Guilliman kept talking, word after merciless word. Maybe. Maybe this was all a big misunderstanding. They all had to want to believe that. Angron wanted to and he had been disillusioned and openly hostile towards their father for much longer than the others.

‘I won’t tolerate this. We won’t tolerate this. If we are to do this, we must work together. Anyone who takes a stand alone is a purged Legion waiting to happen. That’s the point, that’s the response to anyone saying the wrong thing. With all of our Legions and the full resources of the Ultramar Segmentum, we can have something strong enough to be heard. We will have a platform to speak from without being cast aside.

‘I can understand if anyone doesn’t want to go along with this. You’re free to leave anytime. It means betraying our family and breaking our oaths and giving up our honour for the slightest chance of doing the right thing and making a better future.’

‘What do you want to build?’ Vulkan asked. ‘I already know my answer, but I want to know.’

‘Somewhere we can build different from the ground up,’ Angron answered. ‘Not “good enough”. Not “it’s the best we can do”. We can do better. We can be better. We can have another vision for the Imperium entirely. We can chose how we want the galaxy to be and anyone who wants to join us in brotherhood can. We can live and let live when it doesn’t threaten what we’ve chosen to protect. We can chose to kill only when we believe in what we’re doing. We don’t have to be slaves. If that can’t be allowed, we can leave and rise up and become masters of our own fates.’

Curze spoke for the first time, laughing low in his throat like gravel rattling dryly. ‘That will never be allowed. Not in a million years. The Emperor’s dogs will destroy you and tear down everything you ever built.’

‘I have no desire to fight our brothers, so I want to make the possibility of war with us expensive enough they be unable to move against us separately and sweep us under the rug. We can hold out in Ultramar for a long time even if war comes, and I intend to not make the first aggressive move.’

‘Most of them won’t want to fight either,’ Vulkan agreed. ‘Horus won’t want to let them. He’s in no position to join this and would never leave the Emperor’s side, but we can trust him personally at least.’

‘I’ve seen this. You’re the ones who don’t understand. I’ve seen this.’

‘What did you see?’ Guilliman asked gently.

‘The war. Brother against brother. The dead in piles that reach the sky. Fire and blood and the laughter of thirsting gods. The forever war for gain and slaughter, for who will make the galaxy bow down before him.’

Guilliman looked Curze straight in the eyes. ‘You can kill me yourself if you ever come to believe that about us.’

‘What?’ Curze asked. Angron was confused to. He had been hoping Magnus would say something about the unreliability of visions of the future.

‘I am already absolutely sure your vision is wrong.’

‘Why?’ snapped Curze. ‘It’s obvious to any idiot that civil war is likely. Russ, Dorn, the Lion, they’ll attack. It will escalate. You can’t say that won’t happen.’

‘Maybe it will. I don’t know. I do know _why_ we’ll fight if we do. I don’t want your fealty or obedience. I don’t want to be another tyrant, just in opposition to the first. I want to do what is right. I’d do it alone if I had to because I’m that resolute. I want the help of my brothers because you agree and want to work together to our common goals. If we disagree, then I want to work through our differences like mature adults. I’m not the Emperor. I’m not even the Warmaster. I have no authority over you and I’m not asking for it. I just have a plan.’

Curze looked agitated, but unsure what to say back. Guilliman said the right things and projected an aura of earnest, uncomplicated decency. It didn’t seem like he was for real, like there had to be something else under the surface. Unfortunately for Curze, in Angron’s experience if you scratched Guilliman’s surface, you found more of the same and it was turtles all the way down.

‘Do you think that will matter when you die and your works burn? When ragged dark symbols are carved in the crust of planets visible from orbit and filled with oceans of blood?’

‘No, I’m only pointing out that if prescience was be wrong about one thing, it can be wrong about anything else. With that in mind, I’m willing to carry on despite the warning. If you see us losing our moral compass and bringing your visions about, I hope you’ll do something to set us straight then.’

Curze hissed. ‘You know my Legion. We do what has to be done. We are not enforcers of morality or breakers of fates. The Imperium is rotten because it uses people like us.’

‘I saw things about your life on Nostromo. I saw that you decided on your own that your planet was not the way it should be and decided to do something about it. I saw that you would do anything and give up anything to combat evil wherever you saw it until there was no more left. I want you to join us because I want this venture to be something you can approve of. If you can’t believe in it, I can’t make you, but I’ll still do anything I can to live up to the justice you seek. I will do anything to help you with your psychic degeneration.’

‘It can’t be helped.’

‘No, it’s never been helped. I’m not convinced of anything else. Magnus?’

‘As the authority on the subject, I too am absolutely convinced that things can be different. I have not been able to understand the underlying workings of all your powers yet, you are different than anyone I have met before, but from the similarities I’ve seen and how the world of the mind works, there are things that can be done. You may never be free entirely of your visions, but they do not have to be as bad as they are. Nothing about your condition has to be as bad as it is.’

‘I’m fine,’ Curze ground out.

‘You most certainly could stand improvement. You are holding on by your nails over a bottomless pit and you are successfully not falling, when you don’t need to be there in the first place.’

‘Trust me.’ Guilliman stared him down with level blue eyes. ‘You wanted our father to fix you when you first met. I saw. He didn’t, for whatever reasons He had. You thought you would never be fixed and things would never get any better. I can’t promise you we’ll be able to fix everything you want to change about yourself, but I can promise to not stop trying and never give up on you.’

‘Therapy,’ Magnus continued. ‘Training. It may be difficult, it may take a long time and involve many false steps, but I will find something that improves your condition. Your powers don’t need to hurt you. Things don’t have to be this way. You don’t have to feel like you do all the time. Even if you are never fixed entirely, there are things that can be done to stabilise you, to increase control and interpretability if only someone had explained them to you.’

‘Will you?’ Guilliman gave Curze those puppy-dog eyes he never knew he was making, and then that radiant smile when Curze looked at the ground and didn’t say no. Curze eventually muttered something about the corrupt core of the Imperium under all the pretty words and how it needed purging and curled up on himself, unwilling to meet anyone’s eyes.

‘So, everyone in?’ asked Angron casually.

Magnus nodded, looking more at Curze than anyone else, like he was a mystery and a challenge he’d toss away everything else to figure out. Vulkan nodded as well. ‘This has been long in building, hasn’t it? I would rather take an option that allows protecting people rather than killing them.’ His eyes burned with anger at some memory or another of an order he’d been given. ‘We should tell Corax. He’ll be with us.’

‘You know him better than most of us do,’ Angron agreed with a shrug. ‘If you can find him soon, or I suppose he’ll hear the news when everyone else does. Some of the others may be sympathetic, but I don’t know that they’d want to join in. Sanguinius, Lorgar, Mortarion maybe, but they wouldn’t leave Horus’s side. The two of us weren’t even sure you guys wouldn’t call us crazy or run straight to denounce us as traitors when we invited you.’

‘If you’re in such a rush, there’s a lot to get done then.’ Magnus got the glazed look of someone mentally making and prioritising a long list of bullet points that needed gotten to.

‘No sense sticking around when we’ve already made up our minds, right? Nothing’s going to get better while we do.’ Not to mention all the things happening in the meantime, to them and all the people they’d never met. Not to mention another day closer to the one when maybe it would be decided enough compliances had been finished that rogue elements like them weren’t needed and they could be ‘decommissioned,’ in the most euphemistically way possible. ‘We stop sending tithes as soon as we get back to Ultramar. Meet us there.’

‘What’s your endgame, Roboute?’ Vulkan asked. ‘I can’t believe you wouldn’t have one.’

Guilliman shook his head. ‘I have considered any number of possibilities, but there are too many variables that haven’t played out yet. I would rather adapt to the situation as it comes and make the best of it than be beholden to a specific scenario. Maybe we will rejoin a changed Imperium someday. Maybe we’ll never go back, but our nation and ideals will continue to exist alongside the Imperium, keeping alternate ideas in circulation and keeping anyone from believing it’s the only way. I can think of outcomes I don’t want, of course. Let’s not let those happen.’ He smiled slightly to show that had been his idea of a joke.

‘Cooler heads will prevail as long as our more hot-blooded brothers can be held back. We can defend ourselves from attack long enough for Horus to rein them in.’ Magnus sounded sure, as he usually did. ‘Even if they won’t accept we’re right, they’ll hardly find us wanting in a fight.’

Angron certainly wouldn’t mind bloodying Russ’s nose himself, but of course he preferred a diplomatic resolution in all other respects. He’d always known he wasn’t going to go down quietly, but he’d never had the diplomatic skills or resource base to think of doing something like this, not with a chance of succeeding like this had. He’d more fancied himself a dread pirate, but you couldn’t live in the same galaxy as the Imperium and not expect them to come after you with army after army once they’d decided they were going to do away with you. For the first time in a while, after years of ignoring his own disillusionment and dismissing flights of fancy as too impractical to do anything other than get all his men killed, he was optimistic.

He watched his brothers. Guilliman, solid and resolute, willing to fight for what he believed in and nothing else when it was easy and the status quo, and also when it meant throwing away everything else to do the right thing. Not an overwhelming presence like their father, or even as charismatic as Horus, but utterly true to all the responsibility of noblesse oblige and worthy of the trust he was given on every level.

Vulkan, he was always easy to read, projecting his enthusiasm and determination in broad gestures and expressions. Like Angron, his sense of compassion had been bothering him for a long time, but he’d have never moved to take an unpopular stance on his own. With his brothers beside him to stoke the fire, he could vent all the poison that had been building up under his skin and burn brightly the way he was supposed to be.

Magnus, keeping his deeper thoughts close, but obviously already thinking about ways to turn the flow of events to his own ends. When he did things, he did them thoroughly, never considering alternate possibilities outside the framework he’d constructed. If he’d already decided he was going to be on their side of this civil war, then he would be, even if he considered their worldly concerns beneath him.

Curze, sneaking glances at Guilliman and Magnus suspicious and hopeful at the same time, like he wanted to believe but couldn’t bring himself to. He was going to get that therapy. Angron would see it happened if nothing else. Psych therapy, not just whatever was wrong with his powers. No one should be that melancholic and fatalistic, or have as self-abusive a martyr complex as Guilliman had seen. Then they just had to be as good as their promises. Angron had no intention of breaking that trust, and was sure these brothers of his wouldn’t either, because they were here because they wanted to be, not because anyone was making them.

‘Let’s do this,’ Angron said, and grinned.


	8. Post-assassination comfort and strategy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> originally from [this](http://adepta-astarte.tumblr.com/post/63338463121/no-nails-wip) thread, Thiel/Sevatar [PG-13]

Sevatar was extremely distressed. Thiel could tell. He couldn’t tell if Sevatar knew, but it was obvious to him and even would have been to anyone else. ‘Acting Lord of the VIIIth Legion, what does that even mean? You paper-pushers always putting names on things and trying to put them in boxes. We do not grow up to be our parents.’

‘Theoretical: You’re too young to remember your Legion before it found its primarch. So am I, so I can only help so much there.’

Sevatar’s hands were bleeding, though the shallow cuts closed as quickly as he added new ones. He kept fiddling with the Corona Nox, cutting himself on the sharp obsidian points, tossing it from hand to hand, studying the sharp-cut rubies like they might contain the secrets of the universe, putting it on his head, then snatching it off again a few seconds later.

‘That’s just waiting. Or so I hear. I’m supposed to be making _decisions_. How do the perfect soldiers barely have your knickers in a twist when your primarch is dead?’

Thiel did not say: I deal with pressure very well. I think about all the things I can do and don’t even notice those outside my power to affect.

Thiel did not say: My primarch isn’t dead (not totally, not yet, maybe), not like yours who’s going to kill himself. My father didn’t mean to leave his sons, not like yours who decided you weren’t enough to stay for, enough to live for.

Thiel did not say: I already punched Marius Gage out of a daze earlier this week. Can you not tell we Ultramarines are freaking the fuck out over our primarch? No Space Marine could not be.

‘Theoretical: you command the power of the entire Eighth Legion. Practical: What are you going to do with it?’

‘I was considering forgiving my enemies and taking up the life of an enlightened mountain ascetic, but then I remembered the other primarchs would probably try to put that bitch Sahaal in charge.’

‘I don’t know, what’s the sound of one hand punching itself in the face?’

‘I’m sure that could be conclusively demonstrated very easily. It’s annoying because it’s tedious. What would you do?’

Not _What are the Ultramarines going to do? What will Angron do?_ He wasn’t sure if Sevatar would do exactly what he told him, but he was listening. He didn’t ask people things unless he wanted to know the answer. Sevatar trusted him a lot, enough to make him uncomfortable. He was just a sergeant. His own First Captain could hardly handle the pressure. Already a primarch hadn’t been able to. Roboute Guilliman had been struck down and that permeated everywhere.

Don’t think about that. Answer the question. Theoreticals and practicals. What would he do if he commanded the Night Lords, not the Ultramarines? Not necessarily if he were one of them, that would probably be something stupid, they were by and large not the best tacticians. Still, there were things they were good at and things that were not that needed to be taken into account for how they could best be deployed.

‘Stay with Lord Angron and strike at Terra. Make them bleed.’

Sevatar grinned, though it was one of his fake ones. ‘Bloodthirsty. Saying what you think I want you to hear?’

‘Listen better,’ Thiel countered. ‘I’m saying I don’t trust your moral character. I’m saying you should do what you do best, but on someone else’s terms.’

‘Be some other primarch’s bitch, you mean? We’re not known for listening even to our own. Why shouldn’t I make a swathe across Imperial space and make everyone bleed?’

‘Because you believe in something. You believe in something more than you just like hurting people.’ Well, not all of them did, but he was talking to Sevatar, and Sevatar could make them fall into line if he did have to kill half of them to do it. He really would. ‘You believe in this rebellion. You believe your father believed in it. For once in your life you have the moral high ground and you want that for him.’

‘You seem to think we have _your_ sort of happy perfect family.’

Thiel felt no need to pull punches around Sevatar. ‘Why do you think he left you and went alone? Why do you think he entrusted you to the rebellion instead of telling you to do exactly that? Do you want to kill for him or do you want to kill for what he believed in?’

‘You are an idealistic over-thinker. I would kill because my breakfast was too warm. I would kill because I couldn’t be bothered not to.’

Sevatar lied. Not that anything he’d said was technically inaccurate, but there were things he believed in. He was more idealistic himself than he would ever admit to being.

‘I just don’t want you to disgrace _my_ father by avenging him in ways he wouldn’t want,’ he quipped casually.

‘I suppose commanding a Legion does afford me the ability to annoy the hell out of our uncles by treating with them on equal footing.’

Thiel snorted. Sevatar was obnoxious enough to everyone when he _wasn’t_ upset. He drew up more theoreticals and practicals. Sevatar was upset. What was the heart of the problem, as well as he could tell? ‘You can’t save him. He chose this. It’s not your fault, Sev.’

Sevatar laughed. ‘I’m glad to have your absolution. Are you my priest now?’

 _I still don’t love you,_ Thiel thought, and it was still true, but it mattered less than ever. To the Ultramarines, he was just one sergeant, and not one of good repute at that. Sevatar needed him. Then he got down on his knees and licked some of the dried blood from Sevatar’s hands, then pressed his own red gauntlets to them. Sevatar liked to lick and bite at his knuckles, it was one of his favourite things and he could do it for hours, and Thiel knew the symbolic claim on his life he was staking with it. He didn’t even have a father who had higher claim and would theoretically avenge him anymore, but he’d long since passed the point of caring Sevatar wasn’t safe or sane.

‘You asked my advice and I trust the rest of my cousins here’s competence even less. I won’t leave you. Theoretical: you don’t think you can do this. Practical: you can.’

Sevatar rolled his eyes, but he dragged him over and kissed him.

They fucked in Curze’s room instead of Sevatar’s, even though he’d barely lived there for years, scattering indignant cats everywhere. Afterwards, Thiel hit him until he went through every meditation exercise the Ahriman brothers had made him learn, even though normally Sevatar’s therapy was a secret that Thiel politely pretended not to be one of the few people to know about. Sevatar slept, breathing in the ghosts of faded scents from his primarch’s pillows under all the time and cat hair, and for the first time Thiel was still holding him when he did.


	9. Magical Sexual Healing WIP

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Magnus/Curze/Guilliman magical sexual healing of Konrad’s crazy WIP

‘Despite what erotica might tell me, I am not under the impression magical intimate healing is real.’

‘That is almost entirely not what this would be getting at.’ Magnus waved him off. ‘I know what I’m doing, but I don’t have a good metaphor to mundane “therapy” to relate this to. Your cooperation would be useful, because you are the keystone of the architecture Konrad uses to hold himself together.’

Guilliman frowned. ‘That really isn’t healthy.’

‘This is Konrad Curze we’re talking about. Of course it’s something to ease him off in the long term, but any sanity is an accomplishment at this point.’

Guilliman thought that was underestimating their brother, but it was true that he comparatively saw Konrad at his best while Magnus saw him at his worst. ‘That aside, what can you explain to me? Of course I will do anything I can for him since he’s agreed, but the more information I have, the more help I can be.’

‘The simplest metaphor is just like he can have physical scars separate from his emotional problems, he also has mental wounds that are as real in that landscape. It will take a major working, but I need to go in and seal over all of them with a sort of scar tissue. it won’t give him control or stability, but he won’t be ripping out stitches and shredding his inner self every time he has a fit.’

This was far outside of Roboute’s experience, but he could understand the metaphor perfectly well assuming it was accurate enough. ‘Will this hurt him?’

‘In this short term? Of course. I could do it without hurting him in theory, but everyone fights intrusion in their mind even if they don’t consciously want to and Konrad’s worse than most. He will lash out at the slightest thing and in doing so hurt himself and struggle more in a worsening spiral. I will doing everything I can to send him soothing and positive sensations once I’ve gotten some of his channels healed, but as it is now _everything_ causes him pain just from touching his raw wounds.’

Roboute didn’t like the idea of anything hurting Konrad, but Konrad had been the one to ask for his help in this. His hearts ached that Konrad was still so tentative to impose on him and was always looking for a catch when he would give him anything, everything. ‘It’s why we left, isn’t it? Because we couldn’t hold the status quo and let him degenerate when there is anything we could do about it.’

Magnus nodded, unconsciously rubbing at where his other eye wasn’t. ‘There are layers upon layers of things wrong with him, but this one might be fixable and it needs to be to get to the rest or for any long term improvement to be possible.’

‘Do you have estimates for the probability of success?’

‘I can do it, there’s no question of that, but Konrad is almost inherently unpredictable in his reactions to anything. If it goes well, he will want you because you are tied to everything he finds good in life. If it goes badly, he will need you even more.’

Anything. Everything. ‘I trust you. I’ll do whatever I can.’

*

‘Stop asking that,’ Konrad snapped as Roboute asked him if he were sure about this and reminded him he could stop anytime for the twentieth time. Of course he was nervous and wanted to back out and run away, but he couldn’t let himself do that. Forcing him to reevaluate this and overcome his nerves over and over was not helping.

‘Sorry.’

He didn’t like hurting Roboute’s feelings, but wasn’t sure what to do about it. He put the side of his head on Roboute’s chest to listen to his heartsbeat. Lying on top of Roboute would hopefully give them as much closeness as possible without him feeling trapped. He worried more about Roboute being trapped with him while trying to stop him from hurting himself. ‘Just don’t let me hurt you.’

‘I’ll be fine.’

He wanted to believe him. Roboute was so strong it was inconceivable anything could harm him seriously. His worries were nebulous and vague because of how terrible the consequences would be, not because they were likely.

Roboute stroked his hair gently and leaned down to kiss his forehead. With his brother’s arms around him he was safe, secure. Nothing bad could happen to him.

He could feel Magnus’s mental presence ‘approach’ him as he calmed, or let him sense him. ‘I’m ready,’ he said aloud.

+I can hear you.+

+I’m the one who wants to be sure what really did happen,+ he grumbled.

Long months of therapy sessions and drilling had given him a routine to walk through to lower his painstakingly constructed shields carefully and let Magnus’s familiar presence in. He could think through one step after another and not break or drop more levels of shields than he meant to and not hurt too much.

+Good.+

+What am I supposed to do now?+

+As little as possible. Try to concentrate on Guilliman.+

‘Are you alright?’ Roboute was asking as he hissed. Roboute had a large amount of presence in the Empyrean as a primarch, but he was about as psychically inert as a cylinder of argon.

‘We haven’t started yet.’ +Just get it over with.+

+No. Until you’re actually calm, not hoping you can run blindly forwards before the consequences catch up with you.+

Konrad growled in annoyance, but Magnus wasn’t doing anything except being too close and he wouldn’t until Konrad’s emotional state actually changed. It was so much easier when people just did things to him instead of this difficulty and frustration of waiting on him of all people for anything.

Fine. Fine, he just had to... not think about anything except Roboute. Roboute’s chest rising and falling as he breathed. The way he smelled, unknown exotic compounds in his sweat. He wanted Roboute to help him, even if he still didn’t quite believe it’s possible. He would let Magnus help him because it was something Roboute wanted for him. Roboute rubbing the back of his shoulder gently (he always told him to eat more, he was too bony).

Just a dull ache as Magnus started. He was being careful. Konrad just had to

breathe

just

Pain.

( _Still screaming after he’d cut out their tongues. Screaming so loud and constant it shredded vocal cords. Missed half the fun but there were always the sounds they made after when it just kept going until he’d wrung out every last drop of--_ )

Only pain. And pain was just the background noise to life. The important thing was to hold the monster in its cage. To keep calm enough to not induce the positive feedback loop into a fit, like fighting down nausea.

Hold on. Hold on. He was breathing hard. It wasn’t too bad. He’d had worse. He’d never had worse while _not_ killing everything in sight, though. It was the holding back that was making his shake with effort.

It wasn’t physical pain. That would be too easy. This was in his own mind. Everything there was his self and his memories.

()

( _If he weren’t so crazy, had any self-control, like a wild animal--_ Magnus’s thoughts, not his.)

Roboute was holding his wrists to keep him from clawing his own face. He didn’t like that tight grip--trap, can’t escape, have to escape--but it was Roboute, Roboute would never hurt him.

‘Stay with me, Konrad.’

Wanted to stay with him more than anything. It was hard to think anything over the overwhelming panic, the blackness behind his eyes, the need to run, to kill everything in his way, every threat. Roboute. Here. Worth it. Had to be. _No. I won’t hurt him. I won’t run away._ He thrashed with the effort to keep himself from doing any of the things he wanted to. _I’d die before I hurt him._

+Slow, deep breaths.+ Cold spread through his fingers. He felt his body respond without his meaning it to, cutting off his hyperventilating like there was a vice on his chest. It should have felt like the monster, but they were nothing alike, one hot animal desire and the other cool intellect. +Konrad.+

+Do it already!+ Do whatever it took to fix this. Make it stop! He gagged into his mouth with waves of nausea.

Magnus reached out to his physical body and turned off the flood of combat hormones rushing into his blood, turned on inhibitors and sedatives and anxiolytics. He felt Roboute more clearly, trying to be gentle but being firm first and foremost to stop him hurting himself. The memories and the monster didn’t go away, but his reaction to them was pushed back. A healthy soul resides in a healthy mind and a healthy body.

+Now that I have a foothold, I’m going to start channelling to realign your energies as I go on.+

+Fine,+ he snapped, bracing himself for the pain to resume from the dull distant ache he couldn’t quite feel at the moment but knew was there, like an Apothecary had tried an anaesthesia on him powerful enough it took a whole minute to wear off.

They’d done this before, Magnus trying to convince his senses that pleasure as well as pain could come through the channels his visions had carved through his soul. It was like rain--real rain, acid rain--it burned, but sometimes you drank it anyway because you were so damn thirsty for anything that even the bitterness of the grime was refreshing.

He wasn’t prepared for the well of good feelings that slow but ineluctably flowed into him. It was as though it was coming from nowhere, with nothing to tell him the direction. No pain. Nothing more than the slight tugging he would feel from old scar tissue in muscle. Light without darkness. Warm without cold. The monster hissed and threw itself at its bars, but it would rather hide than get out and have nothing between it and this.

Konrad held onto Roboute with everything he had and burned.

*

Roboute settled back to stroking Konrad’s hair as his fit subsided and he stopped thrashing. He wished he knew more of what was going on, information was victory, but he had only indirect hints to go by unless he wanted to distract everyone too much. He just had to trust Magnus and believe in Konrad.

‘Konrad?’ he asked quietly enough that he could ignore him if he wanted to.

Konrad groaned. For a moment he thought it was pain, but his mental index immediately informed him otherwise.

+Touch him. Give him a focus for what his power tells him he’s feeling.+

This was by no means unexpected. Funnelling pleasure into a person was going to have obvious side effects when sex and the need for tactile contact were some of the most basic human desires. They’d discussed this beforehand, but Roboute still felt uncomfortable about the possibility of taking advantage of his boyfriend.

‘Konrad,’ he called again, resting his chin against Konrad’s scalp and lightly pulling his arms over his shoulders. Konrad nuzzled into his chest, eyes tightly shut, and pressed against him with abandon.

He felt he should be jealous of his lover writhing and moaning because of what Magnus was doing to him, but anything that Konrad enjoyed in life was so rare and him being happy made Roboute happy. So he wasn’t.

‘Roboute,’ Konrad finally answered him, clawing at his hair. ‘Why aren’t you fucking me already?’

‘Because we’re going slow so you don’t have another fit.’

‘Not going to,’ Konrad claimed, kissing his jaw messily and getting a leg between his thighs to better rubbed his erection against him, and Roboute could feel himself growing hard with arousal as well. ‘Feels good. Really... good.’

His Nostraman eyes made checking the dilation of his pupils less than ideal, but he sounded as out of it as that time Mortarion had accidentally gotten high testing experimental compounds on himself.

‘Are you sure you want me to do this and you’ll be alright?’

‘Yes!’ Konrad growled in frustration. ‘Take your shirt off already.’ He had his hands under his shirt, but was getting in the way of his own efforts to pull it off. Konrad had complained that they should just get naked before they even started, but Roboute had insisted they didn’t quite know how things were going to play out.

Roboute took his face in his hands and kissed him gently to calm him down. Konrad kissed back desperately and whimpered deep in his throat. It was almost intimidating still, the idea that someone wanted him so much.

Slowly he got to work stripping them, pausing over and over to make sure Konrad was still with him, still alright, just in case he wasn’t. His coordination was suffering and he was obviously being constantly distracted, but when he was aware of Roboute he was trying to touch him.

Magnus’s presence didn’t bother him, and not merely because his physical body on the other side of their circle of power hadn’t moved since they’d started. They were as far from having privacy as it was possible to, but this was hardly a new development with Magnus walking around in people’s heads. Roboute simply didn’t care, for all that he was certainly blushing. He wasn’t interested in exhibitionism in general, but he wasn’t ashamed of what they did together and it was hardly a secret from the gossip factorum in which they lived.

Konrad touching him made it hard to think, which should have terrified him but never did. Wanting to hold him and feed him and make him happy was a persistent distraction these days, but the gratification whenever his efforts were rewarded felt like everything he’d ever wanted. He reached for the details he had filed away, exactly how and where to touch, what Konrad liked best based on their past experience together.

Konrad moaned and pressed against him, but his movements were slightly off. After a moment Roboute realised why. Cross-referencing from Konrad’s reactions--the way his muscles moved under his skin, the angles he arched, he could figure out with a high degree of accuracy how Konrad’s body was translating what Magnus was doing with him. He parroted the touches to anchor Konrad to his body.


	10. Angron Fairytale WIP

As the rebellion got underway in Ultramar, there came a time that Vulkan went to Nocturne to remove all the last remnants of his Legion from there, and Angron went with him. Though the brothers were on opposite sides of this conflict, there was a nebulous understanding between Vulkan and Ferrus Manus that Nocturne would be left unmolested. It was a cold war at that point, and many still remembered their long brotherhood more clearly than this recent conflict and without hatred or bitterness, and so many such dealings took place quietly.

The secessionists had not the military forces to protect it with their base in Ultramar, and in removing all military presence from it Vulkan made the situation clear. To attack his planet he had purposefully abandoned to remove it from contamination by association by his treason would prove every last accusation the rebels had made against the Imperium. That they were not merely malicious and tyrannical, but petty and spiteful. That they valued human life not at all and would commit any atrocity if their leaders thought they could get from it one iota of psychological advantage. That they cared not at all for the difference between innocence and guilt because they did not repay loyalty with obligation in turn.

So was the situation, but the tale here is of Angron, not Vulkan. Angron had never been to Nocturne before and though he said he had come to help the Salamanders evacuation just in case, he did not think it likely he would be needed, and indeed no _Phalanx_ or other such ship appeared in the sky as it had over Deliverance. Angron was there to think, though why there as opposed to anywhere else the chronicler has no answer.

Angron took leave of his brother and wandered the surface of Nocturne lost in his thoughts. He took no great notice of where he was, for after all what barrier might trouble a primarch for more than a moment? So Angron cared not for time or place, supposing someone would come and get him if he was needed or they were all leaving.

In this way, Angron came to a cavern of basalt and obsidian near where the lava flows melted his armour so badly he’d had to cast it off and continue on without it.

He smiled in his battered, scarred face at the thought of what his techmarines would say, but his heart was troubled still.

For all that he had thought often in decades past of rebellion against the Imperium more often than any other man in power who yet lived, he still felt a certain existential trouble since such a thing had finally come about on such a scale. His disquiet centred, he eventually determine on differences between how the galaxy was and how he felt it should be, and while the latter was occasionally useful as a roadmap, it was not real and a dangerous trap to fall into. He must face reality, both that within his heart and without, and Angron had never been known to balk.

Angron by no means abhorred violence. For all that he knew it was a ploy to isolate him and his Legion until such time as they would be purged, he had enjoyed the decades of fighting strange xeno creatures of animal hunger or cruel maliciousness in the fringes of the galaxy. As long as such threats existed, there was no better way to live or die than fighting to protect the rest of the galaxy from them. That was the responsibility that went with the power that had been given to the Astartes Legions.

Violence as a problem solving method between men and women who could think was another matter entirely. Might did not make right. He believed in his cause, yet hated to see it stained it blood. On the other hand, to kill those who would kill you was the natural right of every man. He did not want to fight his brothers, even those he disliked like Russ, and did not want the atrocities that would surely be done in the cross-fire of such a war. He condemned killing for some nebulous cause, but were they too not fighting for principles over survival? A cowed cur might live--but then what of the worlds not compliant fast enough or too ungenerous with their tithes that would be razed? Surely they were right and those lives had to figure into the cost somewhere, urging them to do something. The system they had left was rotten to its core on every level and had to be done away with. Evil was neither changed nor eliminated by tolerating it.

And so on and so on Angron thought. Angron was not a quick thinker like his brothers Roboute or Magnus or prone to introspection often, but when he did think he did it with a glacial thoroughness.

But the caverns, the caverns. The stone was black for the most part, but so studded with crystal it did not appear so. So many reflections were contained in the crystal that the light from lavaflows or fires were visible even deep underground. If one looked long enough, there was just something ever so slightly off about the angles as one went deeper, though.

Deeper Angron went. In time he reached the core of the world. Now, anyone with a basic knowledge of geology would say here this was impossible, but anyone with a basic knowledge of warpcraft would counter that myths have a reality of their own, and that was what the primarch had wandered into, as primarchs are want to do.

Here was the fire that burned at the heart of the planet and many wonders that went into making it and the debris of ancient lands that had been pulled under the crust as new mountains arose.

Only belatedly did Angron notice this, but he was not upset by any means. He, like most people, had a certain belief that things happened for reasons, strange things all the more so.


	11. Assassin OCs

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> most people have someone, in the entire galaxy, who would notice if they were gone.  
> Siress Callidus, Curze [PG-13]

She knew she shouldn’t be doing this. It was stupid, sentimental. It would accomplish nothing and would likely kill her for her efforts. Her death meant nothing compared to service to the Imperium, but that was no reason to seek a pointless one.

Melpomene had to face the fact she simply did not care. A operative of Ordo Assassinorum was supposed to be nothing but fanaticism and death, but one did not get to be Siress of her clade without developing a lot of opinions and trust in her own judgement.

There was no one to stop her from doing anything she wanted to. She didn’t have handlers like the children. She was _their_ handler; she was the one who issued the writs of execution, answerable only to her Grand Master. The Grand Master of her order was dead and nailed to a gate. Her peers were in confusion, bickering among themselves and with the Alpha Legion without direction, not that she’d have let them tell her what to do, not that all of Terra wasn’t in a similar state without the Sigillite.

Well, there was one whose orders she followed, now matter how little sense they made to her. The plan suggested by Sire Culexus, her Ophion, her little brother, was a good one. Let his boys draw their prey out into the open, then let Russ and Dorn and those sorts have the fight they wanted. It was inconvenient they couldn’t torch Terra like they could have almost any other planet, but it was not a reasonable possibility, even as a worst case scenario. Nothing less than a full Exterminatus would have a chance of getting a primarch, and it simply was not worth it.

She didn’t know why it had been turned down. It wasn’t her place to question, except for how it totally was necessary to understand the underlying logic driving Imperial policy at the moment so she could do her damn job and bring things about that would please her lord. No one would make her life easy, would they?

She wanted to... she wanted to see. What was the point, though? She wasn’t going to kill anyone, even if she convinced herself she had a chance. She had been ordered not to do that. Was there a possibility she would say never mind, your cause is just, your revenge justified, I killed someone you loved, you killed someone I did, we’re even, I have no further grudge against you?

Mel snorted silently. Ludicrous. More than anything else the idea that she’d loved Vasudha. There’d never been a possibility of her returning alive from Ultramar. Slitting the throat of a primarch, wounding him to all but death, was the most anyone had been able to hope for, plenty of people hadn’t believed the kill-team would accomplish that much.

Logic didn’t help. Saying ‘don’t get attached, don’t get attached’ to herself over the years hadn’t helped. Telling her to not feel more than a professional pride towards her most talented protégé. She could barely feel her emotions most days, played with those she did feel, or pretend to feel, as easily as she changed her face, being whatever was most convenient for the role she was playing. None of that changed the fact in her mind like an indigestible lump in her stomach. Vasudha was like a daughter to her.

It wasn’t (shouldn’t have been) true, but it worried at her mind like a loose tooth every time she almost forgot the analogy. She didn’t even want children. She kept meaning to donate her ovaries to the Culexus so Ophion could find a male other carrier of the pariah gene and surrogates to breed pariah babies without the problem that true pariahs who had the genes recessively and manifested their powers were usually sterile, but she had simply never gotten around to it. Vasudha was just an assassin, a tool more useful than most and worthy in her service in the Imperium for that. She’d been the one to send her anyway. What was the point of anything (or anyone) if it sat in a box, safe and unused, pretty and pointless? Now she was just dead, and that was that.

Today she was female, maybe middle-aged, maybe just old and worn out before her time by work in the manufactorum. Her brown hair was greying and lank, her shawl patched but as clean as anything was, her gait indicating a decade old leg injury that had long since healed but would never be quite right again, old beads around her wrist--maybe remnants of an old religion or one of the newer fad ones, maybe an heirloom long-ago faded into meaninglessness. A thousand mannerisms, details. People noticed subconsciously things that were wrong, even if they didn’t see every little thing consciously in herself and others the way she did. Even a psychic probe by all but the strongest psykers would find nothing to separate her out from the crowd, the currents of the Warp swirled around her but not sinking their teeth as deeply in her as they might, not breaking their movement to stop around her in favour of dancing onwards.

She flowed with the crowd, letting people bump her at appropriate intervals, turning over fluid mechanics equations in her head, a more abstract hobby she found hard to explain the uses of to people. But then they couldn’t see like she could, couldn’t slip in and out of lives as easily as a swimmer broke the surface of the water and propelled herself forward through it again. Polymorphine didn’t merely sing in her veins, it was her blood.

Back before Unity, the drug had been a hobby of the idle rich; change your eye colour for an hour to impress the hangers-on at your party. The thrill hadn’t gotten any less potent than it had been the first time she’d taken a dose while they drank stolen brandy under the stairs and became someone else.

Yesterday she’d been Cheriz Merchaud, mistress of Chevis Sarkoy the consul of old Franj, the person she was most often. Even with Cheriz’s juvenat, she wasn’t the young dancer who’d first caught his eye, but the consul was an aging man himself who valued the familiarity and well-established guidelines of their relationship much more than a charms of some younger woman. Mel didn’t love him, but had long since gotten used to the fact she liked him. She liked the level of business to their relationship, that he and Cheriz were together for sex, with a side note of pleasant conversation occasionally dipping into politics and rarely personal concerns. She thought affectionately of his teeth against her skin, the way he repeated what his medicae had told him about his diet at breakfast every morning, then reached for the strawberry jam anyway.

Tomorrow she’d be Mowanza Feri, an Administratum clerk with arms like tree trunks but a shy and retiring personality, badgered by his wife for the long hours he worked and at loss for how to deal with his two young children. (If she was alive tomorrow.) The next day Melpomene Stanfield was supposed to walk a tightrope under a tent in a small town in Merica, a name that was a little more real in an identity that was all fake and had been since before she’d founded her clade.

There would be endless meetings with her operatives and strategists within Callidus and the endless childish bickering of having to deal with the other clades. There was so much to do, had been before the great treason, and now everyone was grabbing for power on top of that, and she certainly wasn’t going to do less. Her advisors, the ones who weren’t Callidus themselves, told her to stop playing around, she had responsibilities that needed her full time. She laughed at the idea of being the same person all the time, being able to do that and be what her clade needed, being able to do that and not go crazy like a snake itching to shed a too small skin. Did they think she was a princess in a tower?

The tired woman glanced suspiciously at off-worlders come to the Petitioner’s City to petition for something, thought about buying hot food from a cart but decided she couldn’t afford it no matter how uninteresting the nutrient paste at home sounded, stared at Lectitio Divinitatus graffiti a little too long out of the corner of her eye (maybe she was interested in the message, but all the believers she’d seen proclaiming themselves in the street or heard about in stereotyped jokes were the sort of people she discriminated against the most).

She wasn’t intending to go to the Temple of Woe, just passing through near it. Thinking about a nephew cremated here. It was where the dead went, even if you weren’t a follower of their hokey religion, right?

Maybe Mel wouldn’t find him, maybe he wouldn’t be around. He had common haunts, but arbite patrols never found him there when they were. He always knew they were coming, always happened to be somewhere else. Her passive surveillance did better, sending dupes by proxy with no intention of then sending in a kill-team; it didn’t register as so much of a threat, she got the occasional sighting. Everyone in the hive knew the rumours: one who killed Babu Dhakal, the one who’s killing all the criminals.

Maybe he wouldn’t be there. Maybe he wouldn’t notice her. Maybe he would sniff out polymorphine like a dog and hiss ‘Callidus.’ She couldn’t decide which she really wanted, or at least told herself that was the case because she didn’t want to admit she wasn’t actually in any doubt.

The woman looked up, drawn in by the confusing mess of architectural styles, the arches and buttresses, the angels and gargoyles. Mel was used to the Imperial Palace ranging from overwhelmingly ostentatious to overwhelmingly beautifully ostentatious, and thought this was the next most chaotic thing to an actual daemonic portal in pre-Unity Ursh.

There he was. She saw everything, but her eyes didn’t show it, just the shock and fear of the woman who’d only caught a glimpse of a shadow and prepared to scurry away. The world slowed around her. Her awareness of her own body increased a hundredfold in the forefront of her mind. She could feel the dilation of her pupils, the quickening of her breathing, the activation of her sweat glands. Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing the woman wouldn’t be doing. No sight, no sound, no smell.

 _See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil,_ she thought.

Her quick glance and her continued observation from the corner of her eye, the woman concentrated on the wrong spot, brought her a huge wealth of information. She didn’t have a great deal of firsthand information to correlate with, old pictures, but she’d spent weeks stalking primarchs, Horus and Dorn mostly. Months, when Horus was younger, until the Emperor Himself had told her to get down from that ceiling, stop being creepy, and get back to her job at some point this month, to paraphrase. (She was pretty sure Russ could tell something was off about her, no matter what she tried to do to change her scent. _Maybe_ others had noticed and just not tipped their hands.)

The cadaverous face and skin loose in some places and stretched over bone in others. Rapid weight loss. Starvation near to death. The ragged cut of hair. Sawed off behind the head and while held halfway over the right shoulder with a blunt blade ten centimetres long, purposefully keeping bangs long enough to shadow the face. Armour unmaintained, but no one had been able to seriously damage it yet. He wouldn’t go for a long-range weapon, that wasn’t how he operated, he’d try to use his lightning claws. Wasn’t even paying attention, didn’t have his head in the game, his lips moved when he talked to himself.

Konrad Curze. Fucking traitor.

Her fingers itched. Her blades were coated with the poison, the poison they knew beyond all doubt worked. The same poison she’d given Vasudha. (It had to be her who passed it on, it couldn’t be the Emperor who gave the order to kill His son, however prodigal. That was important.)

She was better than Vasudha. She knew it. She could do it. No one to tell her she was overreaching herself until she tried. She could... Give her an excuse.

_Come on. Come on. You killed my daughter. She killed your lover. Let’s end this. Come on._

He hadn’t moved. Hadn’t changed. Hadn’t noticed her.

She wanted... She wanted...

You didn’t become an assassin because you had a great capacity for mercy and understanding. You became an assassin because you woke up one morning when you were seven and decided to methodically and untraceably murder every single person who had wronged you or yours. You worked as a maid for Duke Metzke for months in the Banian estate you were born, befriended his children, poisoned him and his whole family and most of his advisors. He’d killed your father after all. You and Ophion snuck out of the house every night without your mother knowing to stalk the psyker-demagogue Garin van Schwarcher before his horrible cult reached your hometown. Eventually you cornered him and Ophi killed him with his null powers to render him impotent, and you ran his cult through a mixture of impersonation and proxies for a week because you’d watched how he operated and how all the little pieces of human behaviour fit together and got most of them to kill themselves off in a suicide mission supposedly blessed by their supposed gods. Those were the kinds of things that made you an assassin, and that you’d done them of your own volition with no one telling you to and no training yet was what made you now a queen of assassins.

She’d never felt the slightest urge to leave someone alive so they could suffer more. She liked people to be dead so they could never be a threat to her again.

_Come on, you have primarch senses. Notice something’s off. Notice all the malice pouring off me. Let’s go._

She didn’t slip. She didn’t do one thing that she could have said was an accident later, can’t account for primarchs, she hadn’t intended him to find her out. But she didn’t. She was a professional. She was a fucking loyalist.

Even when she thought she could do better. Take the decision out of her Emperor’s hands. He’d told her not, she did it anyway, she’d take all the punishment of herself. Never had to give the order that needed to be given Himself. What else was Officio Assassinorum for?

No primarch pounced down on her, stalked her out; no one followed her. Melpomene got herself a new security pass through the outer layers of Palace security, changed her face to match it.

She shook her head, on the outside, though Eduart Pinheir was doing it because he’d just remembered he’d left the window unlocked, not to try to clear her head.

 _I’ll kill ten of yours for even one of mine,_ she thought. Slipping into the skin and persona of the Siress, she activated her vox. ‘Awaken Koyne, M’Shen, Sanyu.’


	12. Sevatar has a bad dream snippet

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sevatar/Thiel [PG]

‘Wake up. Wake up.’

Thiel woke up to a cold nose pressed against his neck and Sevatar shaking his shoulder and repeating himself in the tone of someone who could and would do so indefinitely until what he wanted happened. He could have woken up faster with a rush of combat hormones, but if it had been an emergency Sev would have woken him up quickly by stabbing him or something.

How odd. Usually Sevatar slept like the unconscious, even now when he did so more often and no longer kicked Thiel out of bed first, not since... all that had happened. Thiel almost always woke up earlier and he had learned to situate himself out of arm’s reach and go pet a cat or something, because in the single moment of half-consciousness of waking, Sevatar was prone to lashing out instinctively at anything his subconscious perceived to be a threat, which was everything.

‘What?’

‘I had a horrible dream.’

‘What--fuck off, Sev, I’m sleeping.’

‘I died and the primarch gave the Atramentar to Sahaal.’

‘Do you want me to kiss it better and turn on a light-night? Go the fuck back to sleep.’

‘Fuck you, it felt real.’

‘That’s stupid.’ They would never go along with that to begin with.

‘Remember which one of us can see the future? It’s not you.’

‘Not this future. We don’t have primarch anymore, remember?’ He considered picking up the Corona Nox and smacking Sevatar with it, but it was past the opposite side of the bed and he’d have to extract it from a nest of kittens and getting up from his warm cocoon would totally miss the point anyway.

‘Oh yeah.’

Having established this, Sevatar instantly lost interest in the conversation, to all indications, because the next sound he made was a definitely-asleep snore.

Thiel sighed and stroked his hair, because Sev wasn’t awake to tease him about it. On the other hand, by the nonexistent gods, he was going to go back to sleep, damn it, and he would make sure he got revenge later, one way or another.


	13. Psychic Sex WIP

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Magnus/Ahzek Ahriman/Ohrmuzd Ahriman [NC-17]

‘It’s nothing,’ Ohrmuzd squeaked.

Valzen didn’t look convinced in the slightest. ‘If your primarch requires you, we can reconvene at a later date,’ Druses of the Ultramarines suggested diplomatically.

He could cut his losses now and bolt and think of an excuse later, or he could be stubborn and try to tough it out, see how long he could hold out even as it kept escalating. Pride demanded he not simply give in for its own sake, but did he really want to be bothered with such a silly thing when he knew what was going to happen as easily as Ahzek saw the future?

Thinking about Ahzek had not been a good idea as he could all but hear his brother moan helplessly, hear the rhythm of his thoughts, _why aren’t you here already hurry up he’s only going to escalate bothering me to get to you Ohr I want_

Ohrmuzd coughed to clear his head. ‘Perhaps that is a good suggestion. You know how primarchs are.’

The other Apothecaries had to nod, if his comrade from the Death Guard somewhat reluctantly. He’d have to offer details eventually, because Apothecaries were nothing if not gossips, but it most certainly wasn’t going to be ‘my twin brother just had a screaming orgasm’. He’d have to make something up, but at the moment he couldn’t think of a thing other than the arch of Ahzek’s spine.

The Enumerations gave him enough distance to remember such irrelevant details as how doors worked and where the _Photep_ was and how one might get there. He could suppress his hormones, he was of the Pavoni, but it wasn’t _his_ body that was the problem, it was Ahzek’s. While his body might want to respond to what was filtering into his mind, it was not the source of the feelings nor would turning off its systems make them go away.

They’d always gotten this kind of feedback, and it had been a long time since they’d been teenagers confused and embarrassed about whatever their bodies were doing. That they both knew whenever one of them started to feel that way had never been the awkward part, only that sex itself was embarrassing and they’d grown out of that.

His skin itched. If not for his armour, he thought he might scratch until he was bloody from the echo of biomancy on Ahzek’s skin and Ahzek touching himself in an attempt to keep track of the sensations.

Magnus thought this was funny, that bastard. He was enjoying making Ohrmuzd squirm. He knew he was watching, partially from the low level of background awareness in his head, mostly from common sense and experience.

‘You are a cruel, cruel tease, my lord,’ Ohrmuzd said as soon as the door opened.

+I thought you could use the relief of tension after having to deal with Sevatar.+

+Do not remind me of Sevatar and his broken glass mind, in general and especially not now.+

Magnus was smirking, and his expression didn’t change at the insubordination as Ohrmuzd pulled off his helmet and stalked across the room.

However mused he might have looked, it was nothing to the sight of Ahzek stretched out on Magnus’ bed. Naked, panting, muscles straining, eyes unfocused, totally undone, stomach and thighs sticky with seed from all the times Magnus had made him come already. Ohrmuzd didn’t waste time on any of the rest of his armour before kissing him.

He could feel Magnus’ shift a fraction of his attention from Ahzek to him, then he was moaning half with shock and half with relief as Magnus skipped all the usual steps in between and convinced his body to come right then.

It would definitely be embarrassing to explain to anyone the state of his armour, he thought as he pulled it off, Ahzek getting the outside dirty too pressing against him, then with a last clang of ceramite there was nothing between them but skin.

Magnus still stayed out of physical arm’s reach, but he could feel his eye on them as well as his mind’s attention, brushing up against and watching from within their own. Could feel Magnus’ approval of how they looked, how they felt, as they kissed heatedly, fingers digging tightly into each other’s scalps, bodies rutting against one another.

He never thought of Ahzek as his lover. He was so much his self that would be like saying he was in a relationship with his right hand. There was no taboo, no shame, no hesitation between them, his self and his other self.

Then Magnus was meddling in earnest again, until he couldn’t think of anything except experiencing the pleasure his primarch was giving him, his brother. Until all the lines between Ahzek and Ohrmuzd had blurred away into nothing, two bodies moving together but one soul as whole as it was lost in sensation.


	14. A Love Like Blood

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> mid-timeskip fic. I wanted to play around with Sevatar’s POV. Fair warning, it is a rambling and tangential mess almost like I wrote a couple different scenes or conversations at different times then stapled them together at the last minute into the one continuous thing they were supposed to be.  
> Sevatar/Thiel, background Sevatar/Tovac Tor, Guilliman/Curze, and Malcharion/Vandred [NC-17]

Sevatar didn’t show up to watch when Ullios called out Malcharion. Thiel did and related it to him later.

It had lacked the sheer effortlessness with which Sevatar outclassed his opponents when he fought challenge-duels, or the casual cruelty with which he made them totally aware of exactly how much weaker they were, hurt them and played with them, and eventually deigned to finish them off.

Malcharion had always been a step ahead of Ullios, just to beat on the head the idea he was smarter as well as stronger and his ability to think through a fight made him stronger still. He made Ullios get angrier and angrier, and sloppier and sloppier.

Whatever their opinions of tactics, the uses thereof, an audience of Night Lords was inclined to support whoever was winning and scorn their victim. By the time Ullios was ranting that Sevatar was going to appoint his girlfriend to the Kyroptera next, Thiel had gotten a laugh by asking if he knew because fucking Sevatar had been how he’d gotten _his_ appointment.

When Malcharion did go in for the kill, it had been quick and efficient, making sure he was definitely dead, with any considerations for making the fool suffer secondary to making sure he didn’t get a good dying strike in. Thiel approved, but then he and Malcharion were friends for a reason.

Sevatar asked why he thought it was necessary to waste his time recounting a duel when he already knew. He could have recounted it in advance because it was obvious, and he’d have instantly known from everyone’s behaviour if there’d been an unexpected upset contrary to his predictions. He didn’t understand people, but their actions were very predictable in a given situation. He’d already gone to Tovac Tor in anticipation.

He was sure people would accuse him of favouritism appointing his best friend (Thiel said ‘best friend’ was correct as a term). Of course it was. So what? He was going to appoint people he wanted to work with and to have in command, not people he was barely tolerating because he hadn’t bothered or needed to kill them yet and their own incompetence hadn’t managed the job yet either. He wasn’t answerable to anyone. It was his Legion.

‘Shang said to send your choice along.’

‘Already on his desk.’

‘You, do paperwork?’

‘No, I left Tovac there.’

Thiel snorted. ‘Also I’m borrowing him to funnel coordination memos through, so try not to ignore everything he gives you.’

Sevatar thought he and Shang worked well together, in that Shang didn’t tell him much that he didn’t care about and he didn’t do much about it unless there was someone to threaten or kill to change their ways.

‘I know you worry, dear, but if we jump the gun and go down to a planet, it’s because we’ve decided we don’t need your support. No need to rush your precious timetables by an extra second.’ Though it was a stupid thing to do a lot of the time, so he probably wouldn’t. Not against a target that could fight back, and Lord Angron was not inclined to put them anywhere near the other sort in the first place. He’d already decided against running off with the whole fleet ( _like but not like how his father had run off_ ).

‘I’m sure you’d deserve everything you’d get and I wouldn’t lift a finger to help you. I’m more worried about everyone else on the planet if we hadn’t _intended_ to leave no survivors.’

On one hand, the Ultramarine’s use of measured warfare, this much and no more, was a major source of their history of success. On the other, people still died and it wasn’t half as fun. He thought he liked best about these moral killers of the rebellion that Angron really would kill him, not complain while stepping back to let the VIIIth take the blame for doing the dirty work. He might not _care_ personally, but he could _recognise_ fundamental flaws in his primarch and the Legion he had made and how they’d been falling apart before things changed.

‘I’ll put up with snatching my primarch back from those who couldn’t catch him over taking my fun under Dorn’s bombardment.’ If they reached Terra. If his father was still alive. How quickly their mission of revenge turned to one of rescue when it turned out _Guilliman_ was still alive. No one would complain too much what they did next if they found him dead, right? He thought that was a funny joke.

Theoreticals. Too abstract. Too distant. He didn’t know what his Legion would do after that and after that if he was still stuck in charge and they felt a burning, eternal need for revenge, and didn’t have to. Kill what was in front of you, or run away if you couldn’t. ( _‘Because you believe in something.’_ )

‘I’m not worried about Terra. You _have to_ wait for Guilliman there.’

‘Your problem.’

‘Yes, I know. That’s why I’m the one making it yours. There’s no sense sending half a dozen ships at a time to be shot down over Terra.’

‘We already broke through Andrubar. If you can control Warp currents now, you might have mentioned that earlier.’

‘You didn’t have to hit Colnsh.’

‘Yes, I could have left a Space Wolf supply point at our back.’

‘Was it worth the time taken?’

‘I’m sceptical of you seeing the future.’

‘You know I’ll somehow get roped into fighting for you again then against my best intentions.’

Thiel had fought two duels, just for breathing room once everyone had seen Sevatar’s pet had teeth, against captains who’d disapproved of his influence. He said Ultramarines disapproved of duels to the death, but leaving his opponents alive would have made him look weak no matter how he did it.

That was why the Ultramarines had weaklings for captains better at strategising than fighting. They liked people to tell them what to do, who would get promoted, instead of earning it. Night Lords called a duel that wasn’t to the death sparring. What did you really believe in that you wouldn’t put your life on the line for? Sevatar had never gotten a promotion that hadn’t been sealed in blood by killing the previous occupant of that position, and had also never understood the big deal and moral distinction people made of the difference between killing in battle and murdering someone to their face.

Sevatar had been more annoyed when he discovered he was the one who had to see that their companies got new captains, and he could only leave it to their subordinates fighting each other for it so long unless he wanted to wipe out the entire command structure. Thiel still insisted the Ultramarine way was better for getting captains who could lead instead of company champions who could fight single combat.

They’d also fought off two assassination attempts without formal challenge together, one of them just the two of them with none of the Atramentar around. Sevatar coordinated with no one as he fought, but there was still a fierce joy in spilling blood together.

Thiel was no Sevatar, let alone possessing the poetry in motion of a primarch, even Sevatar’s own, but he killed well, untroubled by betrayal or surprise, fighting too dirty and creative for an Ultramarine but too measured and pre-meditated for a Night Lord. He applied new practicals as quickly as he thought of them, unhesitating in taking risks to grasp the possibility of decisive victory. Not that Sev was risk averse himself, but there had been that moment Thiel had let himself be stabbed in the shoulder so he could disarm the Marine he was fighting and use his body as a blunt instrument where Sevatar had let himself get distracted from his own fights enough for a chainblade to tear through the armour above his stomach messily.

He wasn’t much for planning even on a good night, but had been particularly at a loss for how he was going to kill more people if it hadn’t been Jakresh and his squad of Atramentar who’d found them next. He’d already tried kicking Thiel a couple times to get his advice, but he kept bleeding through his vox grate, among other places, without saying anything, and blood loss was making Sevatar dizzy too as his body tried to repair jagged cuts, some with pieces of his armour still stuck in them. He wasn’t dying, but a squad of terminators could have finished him off easily. Not that he was the least bit worried about that from these ones. They were Atramentar.

Who cared what might happen as long as you controlled the situation you were in?

He still didn’t really trust it would all work out. He wasn’t a romantic, but nothing was more cliché in stories on Nostramo than a lovers’ double-suicide. Even he could think of a bunch of stories of a guy thinking his girl was dead and offing himself, then she woke up from her coma and killed herself for real too. It took a lot to kill a primarch, but it wouldn’t be _unexpected_ for Guilliman to find Curze’s body. Thiel assured him _Guilliman_ wasn’t the suicidal type, but still. When people from Nostramo decided to commit suicide, they got it done, had been managing it forever. Not the only theoretical, but a reasonable and dramatically appropriate one.

Rather than continuing their conversation himself, Sevatar idly brought one of Thiel’s hands to his mouth and licked. His knuckles were rough and still a bit swollen from the newest lines added to the tattoos there and winding up across the backs of his hands to curve around his wrists, red skin standing out sharply next to the ultramarine blue ink. It took a lot to mark a Space Marine permanently.

Not marks of shame and failure, but from a similar tradition. In a rough translation of the abstract or stylised symbols and scraps of flowing Nostraman script, it warned anyone who knew anything that his life already belonged to the Prince of Crows and anyone who wanted it would have to answer to Sevatar of the Atramentar. It was a protection, a threat, one to take as seriously as his reputation. He didn’t like fighting because he was obligated to; he liked to fight because he thought he could win. Still, without threats and brags where would anyone be? Not many people saw them what with the gauntlets of power-armour, but rumour existed for a reason.

It also was a sign of submission; it meant being someone else’s bitch. It meant counting on someone else’s strength instead of your own alone. Sevatar’d always found it funny how far some people would go to keep their illusion of pride when it was obvious they already were the lowliest of minion through and through.

Nothing had changed when they were alone. Thiel still complained all the time and argued and pushed, and stayed. Stayed, no matter what. ( _‘Sev, do you really think I’m coming back?’_ ) He either had to be as crazy as Sevatar for being in love with him, or somehow he was misinterpreting this all completely.

He didn’t get it, but he wasn’t about to throw him out. Sevatar would have tossed him out after the first time they’d fucked and forgotten all about him if he didn’t enjoy his company and find him useful to keep around. The tattoos were on Thiel’s skin, but they signalled his intent too, that he’d keep him around as long as Thiel would stay. And maybe after that, but he didn’t have much interest in making theoreticals about idle what-ifs.

Sevatar had gone to see Guilliman soon after he’d woken up to inform him in no uncertain terms that the Atramentar would ferret out their primarch from where he’d gone to ground. They were blood of his blood. They knew how to find him, as easily as they knew how they’d hide. (If. If there was a living man to find.)

He’d dragged Thiel along, because he’d had some inexplicable reluctance to go see for himself his primarch was alright even though he wanted to. Sevatar simply failed to understand truly wanting to do something and then not doing it, or why Thiel would thank him for making him do what he obviously wanted. He was so much better about this when he got caught up in whatever he was doing and forgot completely about over-thinking things, especially meaningless objections about ‘propriety.’

The Ultramarine primarch’s honour guard seemed equally baffled and concerned with irrelevancies like had he been summoned and did he have an appointment. Sevatar graciously let them live so they could have time to fully appreciate the error of their ways in thinking they were able to stop him, let alone had any authority to do so. (Thiel meanwhile crossed his arms, sighed long-sufferingly, and stepped back to watch the show.)

Guilliman himself barely acknowledged Sevatar in favour of his own son. ‘Aeonid, I’m removing you outside the Chapter command structure entirely. That will be worded as a promotion as soon as I decide how to organise the special forces I need. For now, consider yourself responsible for ensuring I know as much about the other seven Legions’ locations and movements as I do my own, and the information flows in reverse as well. Choose those of your brothers you want, and recommend individuals from other Legions you’ve already been working with who you think should be nominated to this sort of service.’

‘That’s just bedroom gossip,’ Thiel said, before getting the look on his face he did when he realised belatedly that that had been out loud.

As tedious and annoying as such a job sounded to Sevatar, he had to admit it made sense to officially order Thiel to stop wasting his time pretending to be a sergeant and go do the things he’d already been doing. He was too hot-headed to be called diplomatic, but he could adjust his thinking to understand other Legions as well as his own hide-bound one and speak to them in a language they understood, figuratively as well as cursing in Nostraman. A position so vague he’d have to define it as he went along suited him, because he could take on more and more, anything he was competent at, and put all his abilities to good use for once.

He also shook off a strange theoretical, what if Guilliman had tried to take Thiel away from him? He wasn’t about the challenge a primarch to a fight, that was stupid, not a fair fight, not the kind of dick-measuring duel he’d have with one of his brothers because he knew he could win. Would Thiel have thrown aside his vows to the Ultramarines and stood up to a primarch, which bothered most people on a deep level for some reason, to keep his promises to Sevatar? It didn’t seem likely, but new swirls of colour kept being inked into his hands and he was still there.

Thiel had complained later about embarrassment and impropriety after Sevatar had kissed him right in front of Lord Guilliman, not remotely chastely. He didn’t quite understand the conversation going on above his head, the one where Sevatar was staking a claim and waiting to see if he’d be challenged, unsure all the while why this seemed so important and why he was making statements in the light instead lurking in the shadows and hiding what was his away.

Guilliman hadn’t said anything about it, and while it was hard to pinpoint the exact moment of someone not doing something, his glare had changed from half-murderous to merely disapproving after Thiel grabbed Sevatar’s shoulder to steady himself and smiled the way he did when he was really happy right before his lifetime of socialisation caught up to tell him he was supposed to be indignant. Sevatar didn’t know what Guilliman was thinking; he only knew that he’d wanted to do Thiel right there, which even he’d known was a terribly stupid impulse he shouldn’t act on.

In the end they’d barely made it a deck from the Apothecarium before Sevatar had pushed him in a supply closet and torn the rest of their armour off, Thiel complaining this was an Ultramarine ship, people didn’t do that here, they might still be within the range of primarch hearing, as if Sevatar might not have noticed these things. It didn’t take long for Sevatar to have him reduced to screams of pleasure as he fucked him, claimed him, and by the time they left Thiel had forgotten he wasn’t supposed to be smirking and swaggering.

Not much had changed from how it had been since Thiel moved in with him. He spent more time reading reports and compiling information to send on to his primarch from all his many contacts across the other six traitor Legions and the Ultramarines he’d picked out to help him. He continued to make himself busy among the Eighth like he’d been doing. Garadon said he had far too many ideas, but even he admitted they weren’t always bad.

‘Tor’s a good choice. Mostly because you like him, but that’s a perfectly good variable to work into your decision-making.’

‘Fangirling Malcharion again?’

‘Hey, he’s the best you’ve got, not counting you. Admittedly that might be damning by faint praise.’

‘Didn’t you check? You’ve seen him fight, but I’m sure with a pick-up line like that he would have been fine with fucking you to take the edge off.’

Thiel blushed. ‘I did not. I wouldn’t... I’m fairly confident you wouldn’t kill him over that, but rest assured my delicate Ultramarine sensibilities disapprove of sleeping around when I already have someone. Besides, I don’t need Vandred mad at me.’

‘Anrathi’s one true love is his spaceship.’

‘But he and Malcharion are definitely...’

‘Of course they are. You don’t think Tovac was dressed when I left him.’

Thiel rolled his eyes. ‘Shang’s going to be pissed. Remember the frog incident after _we_ had sex on his desk?’

‘I’m hoping he’ll be appeased if Tovac’s still naked when he gets there.’

He laughed. ‘That would be weird, but I guess I could see it. When did you pick up the matchmaking bug from Lord Angron?’

‘You think so?’ He had never figured out what caused some people together to hook up in more than a causal, one time thing and others not to.

‘You should hope they don’t. They’d team up against you.’ In response to whatever expression Sevatar had, he added, ‘In a friend way.’

Whatever that meant. ‘It could be crickets this time.’

‘I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to be involved. I’d tell you what Vandred told me the World Eaters are up to, but not if you’re bored of hearing about the duel already.’

‘Entertain me then.’ He smirked challengingly.

‘Lazy bastard,’ Thiel countered, rolling his eyes again, but he started stripping off the rest of his armour carefully and leaving it beside Sevatar’s, if more neatly other than the cats that nested in it immediately. He flopped down on the bed (larger than they needed, _primarch-sized_ ), then rolled closer so Sevatar could feel his breath against his skin.

He wouldn’t have minded if Thiel had wanted to talk, just lying there and listening for hours. He wouldn’t have cared normally about most of the topics, but his boyfriend made them sound interesting and he liked the way he spoke so passionately about things that interested _him_.

Definitely wasn’t going to object to this either, though. Thiel kissed from his fused ribs down his stomach, his hands going to grip his hips. He could feel himself getting hard and made no attempt to silence the moan when Thiel wrapped his mouth around his cock.

He ran his fingers through Thiel’s short blond hair, petting rather than pushing him to take more in. Thiel in turn sucked leisurely, warm and wet. He’d had better, but Thiel had definitely improved since when they’d first started doing this.

It was easy to keep his hips still. Thiel was pinning them in place with his hands, but the grip was light compared to what an Astartes could manage, let alone something Sevatar couldn’t break. He was fine with staying still. He could feel the tension draining from his muscles as heat built in his groin. He could hear himself sighing, little whispers of air barely making a sound.

A shudder ran all the way through him as he came, and Sevatar stretched leisurely afterwards, far enough to hear his joints pop. ‘Not bad. You could make a living on Nostramo sucking cock.’

‘I’d attribute success more to quantity than quality if I were whoring.’

Thiel didn’t fit into mental image of the place anyway. Too blond and clean, eyes too pale and blind, too stalwart and upright; too at odds with the sunless world. Too bright, like the sun and his stupid cobalt blue armour. It would murder him and dump the body in the grime, Sevatar thought, and dismissed the whole line of consideration.

‘Seven out of ten? You Ultramarines must have a scoring system for this.’

‘You know perfectly well half my brothers would be at a loss to figure out what hole to use.’ Thiel licked to demonstrate, reaching for a bottle of lube without turning to look for it. Sevatar spread his legs further without argument as Thiel pushed a first finger in.

He was aware intellectually that some people thought getting fucked meant submission, but had always found that whole body of prejudices stupid. Did you have an orgasm or not? Then you won. Watching someone else fall apart after he’d spread his legs or gotten down on his knees was funny and hot and he was the one making them that way, so that was good too. He’d been known to use _other people’s_ beliefs in such things to manipulate them, but he’d never had any interest breaking Thiel’s psyche and messing with him when he already got exactly what he wanted from him. He didn’t even have to _try_.

Thiel worked slowly, as if he weren’t relaxed enough already from the blowjob. He teased, but not like Sevatar would when getting him to beg for it. When he found his prostate he stroked there firmly with his fingertips to drag moans from him, not light brushes that were just enough to hint without giving more.

Normally he’d be getting impatient, but with the mellowness of having already gotten off, he wasn’t desperately in a hurry for anything else. If Thiel had discovered a new kink of his and wanted to get off on just fingering him, he wasn’t about to start objecting.

‘Do you need a roadmap?’ _Objecting_ was a very narrow term. ‘Hurry up and stick it in already.’

‘Do you need something to occupy your mouth?’ Thiel quipped back, pressing the knuckles of his other hand against Sevatar’s lips. Sevatar happily bit until he tasted blood as Thiel pushed into him.

It didn’t hurt. Not just that the pain wasn’t important, it was hardly there. It didn’t feel great either, though it was getting better with each thrust. It hardly felt like sex, more like idly rubbing against his boyfriend while he talked and getting smacked on the nose when he got too annoying.

Usually Thiel fucked him because he was pissed off or because he wanted someone pressed under him really bad, and Sevatar let him when _he_ felt like it because he liked it that way too. Thiel didn’t fuck him slow and steady, didn’t fuck him when not on edge with lust and anger.

He didn’t think this was True Love or any such thing. He didn’t even belief Thiel thought that, and he was soft and sentimental. But it was comfortable, domestic even. ‘When did we get to be an old married couple?’

‘Why is it you’re even more likely to call me your wife than usual _while I’m fucking you_?’

He simply didn’t want to bother with changing things up, make Thiel give it to him fast and rough. It would require work. Sevatar believed in avoiding work as much as possible, especially when he could just sink into the mattress and listen to soft sighs and the smooth slide of flesh against flesh. He liked making Thiel scream his pleasure, but these little murmurs as he came were satisfying too.

How did you know if you were in love anyway? It was the vaguest of terms. Was there a checklist somewhere? It seemed like the Ultramarines should have one.

‘You feel good,’ Thiel murmured into his shoulder.

‘I did assume that was why we were doing this.’

‘Do you want to get some sleep?’

‘I suppose I’ll be merciful and say you’ve discharge your entertainment duties, and it was you or play with a cat. Malcharion can have the spotlight awhile longer.’ The firmer Malcharion’s position became, so did Sevatar’s, and showing up to fuss like a hovering mother would only undermine both of them.

‘Did you do your exercises from the Thousand Sons?’ asked Thiel, because he was responsible and like a bulldog that had sunk its teeth in when he got an obligation in his head.

‘Yes,’ Sevatar lied.

‘Seeeeeev.’

‘Half of them.’

‘You’re like a five-year-old. “I’m bored”, or is it “I don’t wanna” or “It’s too much effort” today?’

‘You have lots of theoreticals you don’t bother with in practical.’

‘“Thinking about doing it” still doesn’t count as doing it.’

‘You should write motivational posters.’

‘I’m motivating you by being as obnoxious as possible until it seems like less trouble to do what you’re supposed to rather than put up with me. I’m taking a page from your book.’

‘“What you’re supposed to” doesn’t sound like me.’

‘In your case it’s more “what I want you to.”’ Thiel tightened his grip around him. It should have felt like a threat, but even the reprimand that had been intended was lost under the snuggle.

Some people, he had heard, slept lightly and could wake up at any sound. Sevatar slept like the unconscious and woke up whenever he did.

It wasn’t that he was always on guard. He gave openings. He especially gave openings for Thiel to get close. You couldn’t spend as much time developing overkill and underhanded ways to make sure people died as he did without realising how easy it was. But sleeping seemed just asking for it.

He was absolutely sure Thiel would never take advantage of it. He was paranoid, not stupid. Ultramarines declared their intent to kill you openly and honourably, they didn’t aim an entire kill-team at your back when you were sparring out of armour. Night Lords might kill those weaker than they were because they could, but they knew how to kill those stronger too, those they couldn’t have beaten in a fair fight.

 _Mine,_ he thought and it was a satisfying one.

Thiel was breathing against his neck. It was good and he was so tired...

Then there was black.


	15. Relationship Questions

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sevatar/Thiel [R]

_Who cooks normally?_

Neither of them, but Thiel gets Sevatar to eat, when otherwise he’d forget/not bother.

_How often do they fight?_

Pretty much continually. They fight about important stuff, they fight about unimportant stuff, they fight just to be contrary. It doesn’t really matter. Both of them are going to do their own thing anyway. Thiel sometimes tries to change Sevatar a bit, and sometimes he lets himself be persuaded and usually he doesn’t and Thiel can’t really _stop_ him from doing anything.

Ultimately, Thiel can never like Sevatar or approve of a lot of the things he does, it just matters less and less. He does what he can to advise him, but even when he can’t, this is where he’s pledged his life, where he’d needed.

_What do they do when they’re away from each other?_

Pretty much anything and everything except get horny, because that’s when and why they go find each other most of the time. For a long time that was most of their relationship.

That said, when they’re apart they file away a lot under the mental heading ‘I’ll tell him this story’ or ‘I’ll share this observation with him later’, whenever they next see each other.

_Nicknames for each other?_

Sevatar doesn’t use Thiel’s name much. It’s not like there’s a great deal of ambiguity who he’s speaking to when they’re alone. He prefers insults or ‘Ultramarine’ (not that he doesn’t consider that in the former category) or ‘the boyfriend’ or ‘hey you’. If he uses Thiel’s actual name, he’s being serious or it’s important.

Thiel... didn’t know Sevatar even had a first name for awhile. I have not been able to work this into a story anywhere, but at some point they have the exchange:

‘Wait, you have a first name? I mean, Sevatar isn’t your only name? Since when?’

‘Since... ever? My parents didn’t name me Sev Sevatarion. What did you think?’

‘It never even occurred to me!’

He still calls him Sev affectionately afterwards, because that’s what he likes and calling him Jago would just be weird.

_Who is more likely to pay for dinner?_

Sevatar would never pay for anything he could take, so if they somehow found themselves in such a situation, it would be Thiel making sure to settle the bill.

_Who steals the covers at night?_

Neither of them. Sevatar sleeps like a rock, and Thiel doesn’t move around much either.

_What would they get each other for gifts?_

Sevatar is basically a giant cat, as established, and likes to bring Thiel dead rodents or still-bleeding Astartes organs or other such gestures of affection. Thiel doesn’t give him physical stuff because he doesn’t seem like much of a worldly possessions sort of person.

_Who kissed whom first?_

Sevatar. Thiel was very surprised.

_Who remembers things?_

In terms of anniversaries? They both technically have eidetic memories, but Sevatar is someone I don’t see as having a very strong sense of time. It’s hard to explain exactly what I mean by that, but concrete, specific measure like ‘two hours forty-eight minutes’ or ‘six days’ or whatever just very rarely matter to him. (Hence Night Lord meetings tend to be scheduled for ‘whenever everyone shows up’ o’clock.) He simply does not notice or think about such things, it’s all just a vague ‘awhile ago’.

Thiel notices the count of time, but doesn’t find it that important and wouldn’t know what to do about an anniversary other than off-handed mention that it had occurred.

_Who started the relationship?_

Sevatar decided entirely on his own that that one seemed interesting.

_Who cusses more?_

Guess.

_What would they do if the other one was hurt?_

For Thiel not to be fighting at Sevatar’s back like a stalwart Ultramarine, he’d have to be already unconscious or dead himself, or about to do something sneaky and tactically unsound to win them the day. Sevatar doesn’t know how you’d fight to protect someone, but if anyone hurt Thiel they’d definitely become his highest priority for murder and pain. He’d frame it in terms of no one else getting to hurt what’s his except him, but that’s his way of caring and he does care.

_Who is the big spoon/little spoon?_

Thiel’s the big spoon, actually, once they start sleeping together. He likes to hold Sevatar comfortable and warm until he goes the fuck to sleep, and Sev lets him. Sevatar was surprised how much he actually likes cuddling, though he never initiates it. Mind, he sometimes throws himself down on his bed and stares at Thiel like one of the cats demanding scritches until Thiel cuddles with him, but that’s totally not initiating it. Giant cat, really.

_What is their favourite non-sexual activity?_

Talking. Or, more specifically, Thiel talking and Sevatar just drinking it in with only the occasionally sarcastic comment. He really likes doing that, and it’s why their relationship continued beyond the first week.

_Who uses all the hot water in the morning?_

Thiel, though what he considers indolent is by Ultramarine standards.

_What is the most trivial thing they fight over?_

‘Most’ is a very high bar.

_Who does most of the cleaning?_

Anything gets cleaned gets cleaned by Thiel, or whatever Legion serf is feeding the cats that day.

_Who leaves their stuff around?_

Their armour tends to go everywhere when they’re in the middle of trying to have sex. When they undress more leisurely, Thiel is neat and organised with armour stands and such. They don’t really have many other worldly possessions they bother to keep around.

_Who remembers to buy the milk?_

Not that specifically, but Thiel is the one who bothers Sevatar about appointments, meetings, conflicts that need resolved, do the damn exercises Apothecary Ahriman left you, eat, sleep. Shang too, for that matter. When left to his own devices, Sevatar pretty much does only what he feels like when he feels like, and doesn’t do anything he thinks he can get away with not.

_What was their first kiss like?_

Their first kiss was the point in their first duel that Thiel figured out Sevatar had sexual intentions towards him. He was still wasn’t convinced Sevatar wasn’t going to kill him midway through or immediately afterwards.

_Where were they their first time having sex?_

In one of the suits of rooms set aside for the VIIIth Legion on Macragge. They’ve thrown up a lot of temporary barracks for visiting representatives from other Legions who need to be near the Fortress of Hera for a couple days or weeks without the trouble of going back and forth to their ships in orbit all the time. It was basically the closest convenient place to the training cage where Sevatar finally first cornered Thiel.

_Who’s louder?_

Thiel. Sev likes making him scream his name. They find somewhere at least somewhat private before getting too frisky, but they both have definite exhibitionist tendencies when it comes to being overheard.

_Who wakes up first?_

Usually Thiel. Sevatar has a hard time falling asleep, but once he’s out he’s basically impossible to wake up prematurely except by stabbing him or something. Thiel then disentangles himself because he learned with a couple broken bones that in the millisecond between sleep and waking, that exists even for an Astartes, Sevatar subconsciously interprets everything as a potential threat and will attack anyone touching him on pure instinct before his waking mind reasserts itself.

_Favourite form of foreplay?_

They like a lot of things. They don’t differentiate much between ‘sexual foreplay’ and ‘the main thing’, as it were, so plenty of the time they just make out or grope or give each other blowjobs. Sevatar particularly likes licking or sucking at Thiel’s tattoos. What’s foreplay for them is sparring or arguing or trolling the hell out of each other or anyone around them.

_Who performs/receives oral more often?_

Either of them. Sevatar did it more often at first because Thiel was still figuring out how to. Performing/receiving oral has a lot of power and dominance connotations on Nostramo, which Sevatar is aware of but thinks are stupid unless he’s playing on _something else_ ’s prejudices on the subject, which Thiel personally doesn’t have. He likes watching Thiel come apart because of what he’s doing with his mouth. He likes both topping and bottoming in general, depending on his mood. It does affect exactly what sorts of things they say when they’re giving other Night Lords TMI about their sex life, depending on what sort of point they’re getting across/manipulation Sev’s in the middle of/shock value they want.

_Kink they most often use?_

They are actually less kinky than most people would expect. On some level, Sevatar knows that he can’t trust himself, can’t let himself even get started going too far, because he really does have every intention of making the rebellion work and seeing where its ideals take it. So they’re really not into bondage or anything that would cause nontrivial injury or pain.

Sevatar really likes biting and likes being bitten, as well as other things that cause blood and bruises. Thiel doesn’t like when he does this nearly as much and this is one of the running minor conflicts of their relationship. Thiel’s pretty good at keeping Sevatar in check and keeping him from getting carried away by metaphorically whacking him with a rolled up newspaper whenever he doesn’t like something, though their sex is usually still on the rough side.

_Who tries new things?_

They both try new things as often as one of them thinks of something. Thiel’s more likely to veto Sevatar’s idea, and Sevatar usually honours this.

Sevatar’s favourite recent thing is psychic touches and getting Thiel very uncomfortable in his armour in public, thanks to his new and improved control over his psyker abilities.

_If they had to choose a third+ person to include who would it be?_

Sevatar is really confused why they haven’t had a threesome with Malcharion. I have not written this and am not entirely sure it ever would happen, but if it ever did, they would end up having a foursome with Malcharion and Vandred in Malcharion’s room rather than Sevatar’s. It’s just how it would end up happening.

Sevatar’s also suggested having an Atramentar orgy. He’d let them share his boyfriend. They’re Atramentar. Thiel vetoed this and everyone else laughed at him and Sevatar has no idea why.


	16. Stones Taught Me to Fly

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> here is the fluffy, fairly plotless fic of them between Terra and the wedding. Sevatar/Thiel [NC-17]

‘Any particular reason you’re staring at my ass?’

‘I wasn’t, captain,’ the now heavily-blushing Ultramarine stammered quickly as Thiel reached for a towel.

From that he assessed that he had been half right. His brother had been thinking thoughts he was now embarrassed of, but he had not been specifically checking him out or he wouldn’t have lied outright. It was because he was a curiosity, then. The son who did the inappropriate all the time, who was almost an outsider among his own, who deserved to be digging latrines for the rest of his career but had somehow picked up rank as inexplicably as Macragge was gaining a Prince-Consort soon.

Blame the bad influence, but teasing to make someone else uncomfortable could be fun. ‘Too bad. Wedding plans and mop-up from the summer campaign have kept us all so _busy_ and _far apart_ , you know? It makes a guy want to let off some steam.’ He gave the other Ultramarine a long, slow ogle before sauntering off, passing a little too close as he did so.

 _Not like I’ve got a reputation to ruin,_ he thought to himself. He’d been half-lying. He hadn’t been the least bit interested--which probably said too much about his taste--but there was a certain bit of lurking frustration in his life. Entirely avoidable frustration, but it was his choice, damn it. He and Sevatar hadn’t a fight, they hadn’t broken up, but they had decided to take a break and spend some time apart after the intensely close cohabitation and emotional stress of the proceeding eight months. It was a way to take a step back and reflect and make sure he wasn’t hurdling off a slippery slope of decisions that had seemed like a good idea at the time and built off each other until he lost all sense of how things should be to compare against.

Which happened to mean it had been thirty-one days, eighteen hours, and seven minutes since Thiel had last gotten laid, but who was counting?

 _There’s got to be a way to ask ‘Do you want to go back to being casual fuck-buddies?’_ he had to wonder. Just temporarily. Until they’d figured out this whole relationship thing out. Or decided it had just been a symptom of temporary insanity brought on by circumstances. He was entirely aware that was a lie, but maybe Sevatar would want to play along.

He had to shake his head at that. He was the idiot who said whatever came to mind. When had he gotten to be a coward about feelings?

Just for that, a particular memory rose that made his toes curl, but he pushed it aside and continued to refuse to examine it. If he had to think of something, he might as well distract himself with that time Sevatar had been smirking to himself while he casually brushed up against Thiel with his mind until he’d gotten him hard in his armour in public with his psychic handjobs and Thiel had broken a dataslate on his skull. Which was no help for the general problem of thinking about Sevatar way, way too much, but it would do.

*

‘Look, Apothecary Ahriman got Captain Maat to surreptitiously ask Primarch Fulgrim, and he was very clear blue roses were the way to go, with white and red ones as accents.’ Thiel gestured with the orchid in his hand. ‘So explain to me why we’re knee-deep in violets.’

‘Aren’t we on opposite sides of a war?’ Sergeant Constanius asked, but he was one of Thiel’s handpicked men, so it was with a hint of irony. Thiel meanwhile stripped off one of his red gauntlets, annoyed at how the flower’s petals had gone everywhere while the stem was left flattened between his fingers.

‘I’m sure Ahriman would have mentioned if there were any arcane symbols hidden in the flower arrangements.’

‘These aren’t the wedding flowers,’ the Macraggian official explained. ‘These are the gift flowers that were sent by citizens in honour of the wedding.’

‘What are we _supposed_ to do with them?’ he decided on, since the planetary economy and infrastructure had already gone to the trouble of delivering them.

‘We were planning to decorate the Residency with them, of course, but I’m afraid we have more than we know what to do with unless we plan to coat every solid surface with them.’

Thiel considered and riffled through some begonias. ‘Aren’t these edible?’ he recalled from his half-remembered wilderness scout classes, before he’d become a Space Marine scout who could eat pretty much anything.

‘Many species of flowers are edible. I’d have to consult culinary guidelines to determine which ones here are.’

‘Do so, and redirect those to the catering staff. The remainder can be used for decoration.’ Constanius was staring incredulously at the bouquet of begonias in Thiel’s hand, and the captain shrugged. ‘Doesn’t seem right to waste food or just leave them to rot.’

‘Certainly, sir,’ the sergeant agreed, looking away sharply and not looking back at him for awhile for some reason.

*

‘Damn it,’ Thiel murmured absently at the soft sound of his stylus hitting the ground behind his desk. While he lacked his primarch’s eccentric attachment to his own handwriting, he wasn’t supposed to operate his dataslate’s touchscreen with his fingers, especially since the keypad wasn’t sized for them if he wanted a rest of the screen.

Some fruitless groping around proved unsuccessful, so he might have to shift the entire piece of furniture. Removing a gauntlet, he could just get his fingers back there. With some careful manoeuvring with the very tips of his fingers, he could work it out of the crevice it had fallen in and get a grip on it.

His assistants were staring, trying to be surreptitious. ‘I’m not doing anything interesting, you know.’

The other Ultramarines looked away quickly, but he hadn’t recruited them for their flawless records in keeping their heads down. ‘Your tattoos.’

Whatever anyone would say about Thiel blurting out whatever came to mind, he did not always have something to say in every situation. Sometimes he thought things that couldn’t be put into words immediately, that needed swirled around and distilled first.

It had never occurred to him to wonder what Ultramarines, who couldn’t read his tattoos and didn’t know of their meaning as a cultural matter of course, thought of them. What did the rumours say?

Most likely the rumours contained simple failures to understand. He hardly was going to be slandered worse. It was hardly going to be something more outrageous to Macraggian sensibilities than the truth.

Written Nostraman was beautiful, the further stylized and artistic language of tattoo design even more so. The ultramarine blue ink swirled over his hands and up his wrists like creeping vines, words and symbols curled within.

The memories were so vivid as he studied them. Sevatar carding his hair, lips pressed against Thiel’s knuckles, Thiel on his knees and leaning against him. He wasn’t quite sure what was and wasn’t fear, but he remembered how it felt to have the weight of worrying about Sevatar killing him someday lifted off his shoulders. My life is yours. He remembered from those dark days how it felt to be needed, to be trusted, to be allowed to hold one of the most dangerous men in the Legionnes Astartes in his arms as he slept.

How to explain any of that to Ultramarines? They wouldn’t understand it at best, or would tell him things he already knew about not-entirely-healthy relationships, and he’d already had more than a lifetime’s worth of that from his primarch. They wouldn’t understand, the stupid things you did because you couldn’t bear to do otherwise, why sometimes you had to cut your hands open on broken glass rather than let go, and things that were _worth it_.

‘Yes, they mean I’m Sevatar’s bitch. Yes, the primarch knows. No, they were my idea. No, we didn’t break up, we’re just busy. I’m glad we’ve gotten this conversation out of the way.’

Sev would have found this hilarious. Thiel’s stylus hovered over the icon to send him a message across the datanet, but he didn’t.

*

The last time they’d been together.

 _Like waking from a dream, practical concerns returned. Ones like_ We really should move our stuff back to Sevatar’s room, that’s not our space. Not immediately, nonexistent gods know, our primarchs aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, but when we get around to it in a couple hours. For that matter, I should be going back to Ultramarine barracks, since that’s my Legion. There’s got to be something deeply Freudian about the fact the first thing Sev decided to do after being left to babysit his brothers was to fuck his stepbrother in his father’s bed.

_But they could wait a couple hours, everything could, because Sevatar was kissing him and that was everything of immediate importance. His kiss was hot and urgent, but without the hint of desperation that had lurking beneath for months._

_Sevatar was prone to wry amusement, to cruel jokes that only made sense to him and the satisfaction that came from them. It wasn’t a lie but it was still a mask, and it wasn’t anything like this, this pure happiness as he pressed Thiel down. It was like after he’d started getting therapy and Thiel had realised how much pain he’d been in all the time that he’d simply considered baseline._

_Sevatar wasn’t purposefully gentle, but they moved together easier than ever, strength and friction meeting between them just right. There was no fight, no competition; too synched for that. There wasn’t even the heat of passion, even after the fighting above Terra and the almost anti-climactic lack thereof in the strike on the surface, just a warm desire for more of the contentment Sevatar was already sighing with._

_‘What am I feeling?’_

_‘Relief.’_

_‘Obliviously that, but I’ve never heard anyone wax poetry about relief.’_

_‘Are you about to? This I want to hear.’_

_‘I could probably manage a limerick about herding cats and not having to do it anymore.’ After a moment Sevatar shook his head. ‘If I could put it into words, I would know. You deal with it.’_

_‘Fine. Just--’_

_The projection of emotions hit Thiel like a powerfist to the gut. For the longest time, though probably only a few seconds, he couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. Eventually he could bury his face against Sevatar’s neck and bite to distract from the moisture beading in the edge of his eyes._

_‘Warn me before you do that.’_

_‘I did.’_

_‘Not like that.’ How do you get away with feeling so strongly, you crazy bastard, when you look at your own emotions with such a detached bemusement?_

Your primarch isn’t dead. It’s going to be fine, everything will return to the weird state that is normal for you and you won’t have to worry about all this anymore. Like fireworks. Like soft, comfortable starlight. Like being able defy physics and fly from the sense of freedom alone, yet like a crushing weight on his chest. Like thick and sticky sugar, the joy of it. Like a roar building beneath fused ribs before it tore free, not rage but pure will, pure desire. Like everywhere their skin touched, protective, possessive. Like falling asleep with his head in his lap while he talk until his voice sounds like the flutter of wings. Like the heat of a furnace seeping through metal or stone against the cold. Like a place where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts.

_‘Love, Sev. That would be love.’_

_‘Oh. Then I love you,’ he said, not with any great weight or revelation in his words, but as if it were nothing, like he was clearing up a minor point of semantics._

_Thiel groaned in sheer inability to deal with this. ‘I hate you. I hate your face. I hate your Legion.’_

_Sevatar’s lips quirked in a cadaverous grin for a moment that said he understood, in that annoying usually-right way of his, before he joined the argument._

*

Not five minutes after seeing each other again and Thiel was already on his knees, Sevatar fucking his mouth with deep, rough thrusts. Thiel gagged and his hands tightened bruisingly hard on Sevatar’s hips, but pushing him away was the last thing on his mind.

There was nothing hotter than the frantic edge to Sevatar’s movement, the hints he had been hard up for this too and _wanting_ , and when it came to embarrassment about his own eagerness, Thiel just couldn’t care.

When Sevatar pulled away--too soon, Thiel wanted more, the taste of him, the smell of him, the way he felt against the spasming muscles of his throat--he was panting too. He was close already, and predatory with impatience and possessiveness, trying to take everything as fast as he could.

Sevatar slammed him against the wall, and Thiel pulled him with him, groaning as Sevatar’s hardness pressed against his thighs, his own erection, wet with spit.

‘We’re not going to be late for the wedding,’ Thiel insisted.

‘Unless it takes fifteen hours for you to get me off, I see no reason to worry.’

Then they were kissing again, biting, noses and foreheads bumping and not bothering to adjust. Thiel could hardly recognise his own gasps escaping, wrung out by the burn of Sevatar pounding into him and how good it felt.

He didn’t normally like it so rough, but at the moment it was the best part. This was what burned the frustration that had been building in him. The pain only fuelled the fire, brought out the combat hormones designed to make an Astartes feel _right_. Hard and fast and holding nothing back. It didn’t last long, but like flooring the acceleration of a bike even as you hurtled towards a cliff, why would you want to stop?

Panting and sticky, he laughed at himself, at them. ‘I missed sex.’

‘Even _I_ know you’re supposed to say “I missed _you_.”’

‘I might have done that too. But right now I’m remembering why you annoy me, and why sex is amazing.’

Sevatar laughed, and just hearing that sound brought him a jolt of happiness whether he meant it to or not.

He’d never meant for _feelings_ to get involved. He was the Ultramarine here and he hadn’t. As if you could see someone coping, or not, every day for eight months, and tell the whirlwind of vengeance and grief that wanted to consume him ‘You can’t have him. He’s mine.’ every day unless you cared. He of all people should have known better about Sevatar too: he didn’t understand emotions, including his own; that was an entirely different matter from not feeling them.

‘Don’t you have sweet words for me?’

‘Only if you shut up and listen, and you shutting up would take a miracle.’

Thiel pushed his forehead against Sevatar’s pointedly and let out a deep breath. Then he let go of words or sense or propriety and allowed his honest feelings to rise to the surface of his mind. _Missed you so much, every time I turned around expected you to be there, why is everything so dull without your commentary, cold and boring without your passion without your fingerprints bruised on my skin, so many things I said wanting waiting to hear your laugh, what’s wrong with me that I love you, do you have any idea what it feels like to know you trust me love me miss me want me to hold you, I want everything, want you, want this us._

‘I knew _that_.’

‘I hate it when you’re right.’

‘So, always?’

‘It must get tiresome, being right all the time.’

‘It’s a burden I have to bear, since, after all, the world is made for my amusement.’ He pounced on Thiel, hints of affection and possessiveness half hidden under being heavy and sweaty and otherwise annoying so Thiel would bat him away.

‘That explains a lot.’

*

It wasn’t often Sevatar slipped between sleep and wakefulness with the smooth glide of a hot knife through flesh or his chainglaive through the air.

Thiel was still asleep and didn’t stir. His arms were still loosely around Sevatar, holding him close, his lips pressed in Sevatar’s hair, and it was weird to have so much warm bare skin against his own while they were still aside from breathing.

It was probably the therapy, he had to admit, despite himself. It was annoying to admitting to weakness, to needing anyone’s help, especially from anyone other than his Atramentar brothers. On the other hand, it made him stronger. It felt odd, because he’d never been the type always trying to better himself. Things just came naturally to him, and he himself was always somewhat bemused when they did.

Apothecary Ahriman, who’d lost a couple stones of weight and seemed to have aged years, as far as Astartes aged, over the couple months of healing the Ultramarines’ primarchs, had insisted in no uncertain terms on renewing their lessons.

Sevatar had complained he didn’t care about fancy tricks or philosophy. He had the bare minimum he needed for everything not to hurt all the time (and wasn’t that a revelation). Ahriman had countered that what Night Lord ever turned down a dirty trick for his arsenal or, whatever they might say, not resorted to using psykers the instant it was useful?

Sev couldn’t argue with that, rare enough that there was any question of him needing the help to win a fight. He wasn’t the zappy lightning sort of psyker anyway, his genestock wasn’t really inclined that way. He had the usual VIIIth things: knowing what someone was going to do the moment before they did; the intuition of where exactly to hit, what to say, where to touch; slowing down time, or speeding up his perception of it; dreaming true dreams; the press of minds around him and the swirls of their emotions; a mild telekinesis, mostly of what people thought they were feeling than physical movement. Apothecary Ahriman and his twin had unwound and smoothed over sharp edges until he could reach for power on purpose without shattering the whole edifice.

At least he didn’t see the distant future beyond a second or two. That never went well for anyone.

So he had power and more power and his primarch back and better and an end to responsibility he hadn’t wanted and the man whose arms he was in.

If you were powerful enough, you didn’t have to worry about your reputation. You didn’t have to be insecure about every momentary whisper when you reinforced it in blood and sheer overwhelming superiority of strength often enough.

So he could wonder idly what other people would say, if they could see them. _Sevatar likes being held by his boyfriend. Sevatar likes that someone likes him. Sevatar likes to pretend someone can make him safe._

Thinking about what other people might say didn’t mean he cared.

The grey cat that had followed him from Curze’s quarters, the one Thiel called Magnica Apollonia, padded over and threw herself down next to him, demanding petting. Sevatar had never been good at following orders, but he occasionally made exceptions. The fur of her side was long and soft and he could feel the lumps and heartbeats of her kittens under her thin skin.

+Now that I don’t have to heard those metaphorical cats that are my brothers anymore, we can teach your spawn to hunt together, Cat.+

She meowed, remembering playing games with Sevatar with her own litter-mates. _Play pounce of Taye from above?_

+It’s a good game. Pilots need to think in three dimensions,+ he insisted with dry irony, not caring the cat thought neither in words or such complex or abstract concepts.

_Play swarm and bite Aeonid?_

He smiled, enjoying the echo of bright blue and how Thiel smelled to her. +Fun games.+

 _Yes fun. Under my chin, right there._ She rumbled with purrs. 

Thiel shifted next to him, not snapping awake quite yet, and he hummed, which came out sounding like a deep growl, but meant the same.


	17. Ponytail

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sudden mental image I felt the need to share with a drabble. Sevatar/Thiel [PG]

‘Wait,’ Thiel said suddenly, grabbing Sevatar by the hair and the shoulder before he could throw himself onto the bed.

‘What? Didn’t you get enough of that already?’

‘I just realised I spent all that effort washing your hair and you’re going to get it all sweaty and gross again if it touches your skin.’

‘Then maybe you shouldn’t have given me such a workout.’ Sevatar raised an eyebrow and quirked his lips lasciviously.

‘Alright, I’ve got an idea,’ Thiel said after a moment of ignoring him and thinking. He transferred the clump of hair into Sevatar’s fist from his own, and his boyfriend humoured him rather than face the whining and complaining of doing otherwise.

After a minute he returned with a rubber band from Sevatar’s desk. ‘My sisters used to say to never use a rubber band for this, but I don’t remember if they ever said why and it probably doesn’t matter,’ he said, one of those stray, fragmented flashes of memory Astartes had of their childhoods. In a few quick motions he had Sevatar’s hair in a high ponytail and off his shoulders.

‘Of course you had sisters.’

‘What’s wrong with that?’ He pinched Sev hard right where he knew he’d still be sore.

‘It’s so you.’ Changing the subject, he asked teasingly, ‘Am I cute?’

It looked bad on him, making his always skull-like face look even more drawn and gaunt, though he had been eating better since his primarch got back. With a totally straight face Thiel answered, ‘You’re adorable.’

‘Flatterer.’

‘Do I need flattery?’

‘No,’ Sevatar agreed, and pulled his lover to him.


	18. Having Issues

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sevatar/Thiel relationship meta

Thiel’s not a guy normally associated with “having issues”, probably because they’re so low-key and he’s so functional compared to so many other people around him, but yeah, like most people he’s got his own things going on.

Thiel’s spent his entire life being told that he’s wrong and there’s something wrong with him. He’s not purposefully trying to be rebellious most of the time, he just does things that seem natural and obvious to him. Afterwards people yell at him and he’s totally baffled about how anyone could have found that objectionable, and it worked didn’t it and clearly doing otherwise would have lead to more losses.

As time goes on and Thiel’s record gets more and more marked up in red, like his helmet, he both gives up and digs his heels in on some level. He doesn’t care about getting in trouble. That just happens, he couldn’t avoid it successfully if he tried. He’s going to keep doing what he thinks is right, no matter how often he gets told he’s wrong. In contrast to, say, TCF!Sigismund, no one has ever been able to make Thiel feel guilty, ashamed, contrite, or whatever over the fact he acts like he knows better than his superior officers or established protocols. He feels, vaguely, like he should be and something’s wrong with him because he doesn’t, but that’s not the same. It doesn’t help that he is an efficient fighter and commander, so he has ammunition for his belief that doing things by the book on principle or following an order he knows won’t work from the ground isn’t worth people’s lives. He’s not suggesting total anarchy, just... flexibility to cope with an inherently chaotic world.

Then he meets Sevatar. Sure he knows other Legions do things differently, but most Astartes gossip is about how other people do things wrong, their specialty isn’t as good as our specialty, they’re tactically unsound or moral degenerates, it’s not our way, and certainly the Ultramarines are no exception. He’s been on joint campaigns but he’s a young and low-ranking battle brother among people who’d rather keep to their own. He would never have thought to hold himself to anyone else’s standards, then he ends up in a situation where he spends a lot of time trying to see from a totally different world view and perspective.

Sevatar thinks he’s not just interesting, but intelligent and a sound tactician. He’s mocked by Night Lords for being _too_ orthodox, too moral when for years he’s heard that he’s somehow ethically lacking for even imagining the things that always get him in trouble. He’s tried not to internalise it, but it was always there, an ache at the back of his mind. He wanted to be a good person. He wanted to be right.

He’s initially uncomfortable with the idea he’s in love with Sevatar for a lot of reasons. One of them is he worries he’s making too many excuses for him, letting himself get acclimated to the Night Lords being bad people and doing terrible things, often casually and as a matter of course. Another is that he worries his love is selfish. He loves Sevatar for loving him. He loves Sevatar for wanting him, trusting him, believing in him, needing him. Even in the early days of their relationship, Sevatar wasn’t affectionate or good with people, but everything he did told Thiel that he was worthwhile, that he had worth and was worthy. He thinks love should be selfless but he’s only in it for the validation he gets, and he doesn’t want to be a person like that.

You shouldn’t be in a relationship with someone because you want to change them, but he worries sometimes he is. He worries that while he’s changing Sevatar a little, Sevatar’s changing him even more (and these are Night Lords here, how could it be for the better?). Then he worries more that he _isn’t_ , and that he loves Sevatar more than he _cares_ that he’s horrible. What would be enough to make him fall out of love, to draw a sword on Sevatar and say oh hell no? But he’s selfish, because Sevatar is good to him, in their own way, however he is to anyone else.

Thiel doesn’t know if he _should be_ in love, if it’s right or wrong, but even without those answers he eventually has to admit he _is_.

*

Sevatar, on the other hand, had totally different issues leading him to take a really long time to admit he was in love even after it became true and then became obvious. He’s just really stupid, with emotions.

At various points over the years, people have told him various things about how horrible he is and how he’ll never experience love, or *sigh* you just don’t get it, Sev, depending on whether they’re his various detractors or Atramentar. He believed them. It seemed only reasonable to do so, since he really didn’t get it. He clearly has strong feelings for Curze and his Atramentar brothers and a handful of other people, but he wasn’t really sure what that was, and was pretty confident it didn’t fit the criteria he’d heard for romantic love.

So he spent awhile after he and Thiel started living together wondering ‘Is this love?’ out of sheer uncertainty. He thought, by definition of who he was, it couldn’t be. But Thiel was clearly in love with him, right? Or he was misinterpreting this somehow? He wasn’t going to ask anyone in his Legion, as has been said: no one wants a Night Lord’s romantic advice, and the only other people he might have asked are Thiel himself and Ahriman, who’s too busy.

So when this is finally clarified for him, he’s very ‘Oh, okay’ about it. He didn’t think he was capable of falling in love, but he had no particular investment in that belief. He doesn’t have ‘I am a monster, I cannot possible love!’ issues. It’s just correcting a factual error.

Because he could do something extreme in defiance of the idea, hurt Thiel physically or emotionally very badly, but why? He has nothing to prove to anyone, including himself, especially since everyone else already knew and has been mocking him for it for months. Why would he care about rejecting a label? It is just a description of his feelings, which undeniably exist. He might be a son of the sunless world when it comes to lying, but what’s true is true. If the word for it is love, then he loves Thiel. Nothing changes.


	19. Carefully

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mortarion/Shyama ([OFC](http://absurdfact.tumblr.com/post/52811985759/mortarion-in-the-no-nails-au)), WIP [R]

‘Do they hurt?’

‘No. Most of the nerves are dead. It was a long time ago anyway.’

‘Then can I touch them or would you rather me touch somewhere you can feel it better?’

Mortarion was sure he’d be blushing if his skin could show that. ‘We can go slowly.’ That was what they were doing, right. And it wasn’t so strange she might be interested in his scars, however they looked. Shyama was a medicae as well as a toxicology researcher. She was in the habit on having a professional interest in such things.

He wasn’t cold, he only had his shirt and cloak off, he wasn’t in the middle of a snowdrift or anything, but he shivered anyway when one of her small hands cupped the more heavily scarred side of his face. He couldn’t feel the skin itself, but many of his scars were deep and he could feel the pull of all the scar tissue under the surface on his muscles.

He knew what his scars felt like. Rough, shiny, twisted and discoloured skin over knots of damaged or dead tissue, fibrous ridges of keloids where they’d healed particularly badly that still twinged or itched often. She didn’t look disgusted, but she was hardly going to be squeamish.

‘You can touch too.’ She did blush. ‘If you want to.’

He put a hand on her shoulder and it curved halfway around her back, but it felt much too awkward to move lower. How had humans been managing to get any further than this since the dawn of time? It was so difference from the normal distance he kept from people.

Her dark brown skin was smooth and his hand looked so pale to almost be grey in comparison. She had pulled off her shirt and unhooked her bra in a few smooth motions, but he wondered if she was as nervous as he was, if it was really alright to touch too boldly. She wasn’t pressing herself against him or whatever lewd things people did when they were overcome with passionate sexuality.

She traced down his face and neck to his chest. Her hands were tiny in comparison to the span of his shoulders. He could feel the pressure even if the textile details of the touch were distant. She followed some of the oldest scars, the ‘Y’ across his chest and shoulders. Too clean, too precise to be a battle-scar. He didn’t want to explain about the Warlord. ‘Are you looking to replicate a chemical formula that you know must exist?’

‘No,’ he said, and it was nice she didn’t make him say it outright, that she could put two and two together, of course she could she was brilliant. He didn’t have to say ‘the xeno that raised me used to cut me open to see how I worked without anaesthesia because nothing worked on me’, she could figure it out.

She kissed his shoulder, then the other, but didn’t trace those scars. Mortarion was glad. He didn’t want them to be part of this; this thing with her, his life as it was now.

She was soft and squishy under his hand as he experimentally moved a little lower. The give of her body felt nice, but he didn’t want to press harder lest he hurt the fragile mortal. She made a squeaking sound as he cupped one of her breasts with two fingers. He thought that was a good noise. He ran his thumb over the curve of her breast lightly and she made it again. ‘Keep doing that.’

He hadn’t expected human woman to feel like this, bouncy curves unlike the unyielding planes of muscle he was used to. He’d known they had higher percentages of fat stores than men, let along Astartes, but he’d had little experience to guess what that would feel like before he’d had his hands on her and the layers of glandular, adipose, and connective tissues under the skin he was touching.

Along with way more information than he had ever wanted to know, Guilliman had included a few useful suggestions he thought they could try. Kissing down the curve of Shyama’s stomach, he could at least be confident he wasn’t going to hurt her if they did this, though he worried he wouldn’t know what to do and she wouldn’t like it.

The sounds she was making definitely didn’t sound like she disliked it, and he felt a warm jolt in his groin as well at that, which he ignored for the moment.


	20. Atramentar POV

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> snippets, Sevatar/Thiel, background Sevatar/OMCs [PG-13]

The Atramentar loved their captain dearly, but there was just no denying the fact he could be really, really strange.

‘Why is he fucking that Ultramarine?’

‘It’s Sev,’ Vraal said dismissively, as if that explained everything. What it explained was that the best answer anyone was going to be able to come up with with any surety was _Who knows?_ ‘Maybe he was trying to figure out why the primarch’s doing it, and decided the hand-on approach was the easiest method?’

‘But why that one?’ Etzlin muttered. Not that he held a grudge or anything, it had been a perfectly good brawl and he wouldn’t deny playing any roll in starting it. It had been kind of funny to see the momentary look of horror on the Ultramarine’s face when he’d realised what he’d gotten himself into, but he and his brothers had put up an enjoyable fight, for a casual go between Astartes.

‘Did he have a nice ass?’

‘I have no idea. I wasn’t in armour but he was.’

‘Too bad.’

‘It’s one thing for the captain to have fucked him once. I mean, what the hell, why not? But why’d he do it again? How’s some Ultramarine that good?’

‘Hey Sev,’ Jakresh, the traitor, called over as he walked in to the practice room the Atramentar were sparring in. ‘Etzlin's way too interested in your new boy-toy. He thinks he could do better.’

‘Jealous? If you want me that much, you could just ask. Try on your knees.’

The thing was, if he went along with it, Sevatar really would fuck him. He made things into jokes because he thought that was just how life was scripted, but he said plenty of things he meant too, if anyone were to call him on it, especially to his company brothers. They’d done it before and it had been perfectly fine. But he really was quite happy not being Sev’s bed-warmer.

‘Hey asshole,’ he shot back at Jakresh. ‘I’d rather duel you than try to upstage Sev’s new girlfriend. Sometimes shooting fish in a barrel just gets boring.’

‘Yeah, yeah, you can suck my dick after I kick your ass.’

‘In your dreams.’

*

‘How do you think he is?’ Thiel snapped, and Etzlin remembered hearing before how this wasn’t anyone with a brain-to-mouth filter at all. ‘His primarch just told him that he wasn’t worth living for.’

‘Are you bad-mouthing my primarch?’ His lightning claws crackled a bit at the spike in his combat hormones triggered their systems to come out of hibernation.

‘Of course I am, what does it sound like? I don’t care about your primarch in the least. I care about his effect on Sevatar, and it’s bad. If I were less angry, maybe I could be fair, but right now I’m not expecting to ever forgive him for that.’

‘Your father’s dead too,’ he muttered, because while he wouldn’t have thought to put it that way, it probably had been an accurate description of the last conversation Sevatar and their sire had had.

‘Yes, he is, but he didn’t _choose_ to leave us.’

‘What should we do then, if you’re so wise?’

‘Be there for him. He needs the Atramentar to anchor him. He needs your brotherhood to have any chance of being what your Legion needs.’

Because Sev loved their father and had never stopped trying to save him, even back before the rebellion when everything had seen futile, and was his favourite in turn; yet he would go beyond death, it had always seemed, for his Atramentar brothers. Because Sev didn’t show easily that he was devastated, didn’t weep or rage. He smiled a fake, fake smile, and made bad, impulsive decisions.

‘Yeah, well, I was going to do that anyway,’ Etzlin muttered. Didn’t need someone to tell him that.

This was an Ultramarine, not one of them. But he was willing to die for the Atramentar’s beloved captain, and when times were rough you realised what really counted.


	21. Good People

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sevatar is not a nice person and Thiel knows.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sevatar/Thiel, early in their acquaintance, PG-13

_Should I even bother? Is it worth fighting over? Is it futile? Should I just let it go and be glad it’s nothing anything worse to take the edge off?_ Thiel thought, all belatedly, after saying, ‘Stop.’

‘Why?’

‘You’re hurting it.’

‘I noticed.’ Sevatar smirked. ‘My gallant hero, you know who I am.’

It was true. Thiel knew, and he knew he preferred to look away.

The moth fluttered weakly and in circles. Its left wing wasn’t catching the air right, due to the long, thin tears in the delicate tissue.

‘Listen.’ Sevatar caught it again, with gentle fine control. ‘Not even the finest rice paper comes apart this softly.’

He could hear the tissue separate with Astartes hearing. Sevatar batted at it as it slowly fell, prolonging it as the breeze generated lifted it again, like a cat amusing himself. Back when Sevatar had originally courted him with dead small animals, he had been more worried about his own life and confused by the weirdness than to appreciate the giant cat. And cats were cruel.

He stepped towards Sevatar, crushing the moth under his boot. Putting it out of its misery. He’d been on the battlefield before, heard the screams of the dying. Astartes were made for war and exulted in killing, but... ‘Don’t.’

‘Will you fight me over it?’

‘I’ll lose,’ Thiel didn’t hesitate to admit. ‘But fight me away. Watch me not be strong enough to stop you from doing anything you want to. Watch me be helpless and angry and hate you for it. Keep your eyes on _me_.’

‘You can keep me interested?’

Every movement of Sevatar’s was quick and predatory, a reminder he was strictly better and they both knew it. Thiel didn’t flinch or step back.

‘I will.’ Everything could be a weapon.


	22. Sinus Massage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Blurred vision and sinus massages.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sevatar/Thiel, while living together, sfw

‘You know that thing, when you’re tired and your vision starts to blur?’

‘No, Sev, I don’t, because that doesn’t happen to Space Marines unless there’s something horribly wrong with us. But by all means continue what you were going to say while your brain bleeds out your ears.’

‘If this one were going to kill me, it’s sure taken its time.’

‘Wait, this is a regular, recurring thing for you?’ Sevatar shot Thiel what he’d learned to read as his _Wait, is this not a normal thing for everyone?_ look. He couldn’t say _Have you seen an Apothecary?_ or, perhaps, _Have you spoken to a Librarian? Are you bleeding from anywhere? Everywhere?_ ‘Have you considered sleep? I hear it’s a thing, that people do.’

‘Ha ha,’ he drawled. He shook his head sharply, like he was in pain, and then like that hurt more, good job genius.

Theoretical: it hurts him. Why? Eyestrain? ‘Should I turn out all the lights?’ Curze’s chambers weren’t exactly lit at the best of times, but there were a few stray buttons that gave enough illumination for an Astartes to see by compared to the utter blackness of being in an air locked-sealed room in a space ship with no light being produced.

‘It’s not,’ Sevatar used a Nostraman word that had something to do with ‘light-knives slicing eyeballs’ when translated literally. ‘It’s under the cheekbone. The eyes are just the blurriness and spinning when there’s the vertigo. Think if I crack the bone apart it will stop?’

‘Let’s call that plan B. It’s... facial pressure? Oh my science, you’re having a sinus headache.’

‘I’m hardly being a baby about it.’

‘I don’t care. The fact you can even feel it is the issue. Come here.’

Sevatar took two steps closer but not far, and cocked his head to the side in question. Thiel pointed to the bed next to him. ‘We going to have a heart-to-heart?’ he asked as he sat.

‘Actually this would probably work better if you shut up for once.’

Thiel pulled Sevatar back, slowly enough to telegraph his actions, firmly but without any attempt to force or wrestle. Sevatar let him lower his head into his lap, but caught his hand as his thumbs approaching his face. An instinctive reaction; Night Lords would always go for the eye gouge.

‘Do you trust me?’

‘Signs point to yes,’ he began to say and he released his grip, but it was half swallowed in a sharp exhale as Thiel’s tattooed thumb and forefinger found his cheekbones. ‘Gonna rearrange my skull for me?’

Thiel was quite capable of recognising that for a sound of relief, not pain. He modulated his pressure carefully, though, as he dug circles into the edge of Sevatar’s eye sockets under tight-drawn skin.

He was still watchful, an animal’s wariness despite everything that told him to relax, as Thiel moved to the point between his eyes, his temples right below the hairline, in the hollows in front of his ears, rubbing gentle circles with his fingers.

‘Why are you doing this?’ Not vulnerability, but such total, utter confusion. Like Sev fundamentally could not understand a transhuman warrior (or anyone) having the barest scrap of empathy wired into them that urged to ease pain when it was in front of him, however ancient the instinct.

 _I..._ ‘Because I have to deal with you every night. Does that feel better?’

‘I knew I kept you around for a reason.’

‘Drink more water. Sleep more. We may be the best biotechnology has produced, but it needs some resources to work with.’ He knew there was a great deal more to the Prince of Crow’s body’s desire to fall apart around him than that. He could feel clots of dried blood in the mucus that drained from his nose when he sneezed, ever so politely onto Thiel’s arm. But he could pretend, with his lover’s head in his lap, that his intentions could help him too. It felt good to feel his tension and subtle twitches drain away despite himself. He could pretend he could chase away Sevatar’s pain and shout for all his daemons to hear that he was lo... not alone.

‘Maybe. Maybe I’ll settle for you.’ Sevatar did not speak of the things in his sleep or the voices that pressed in around him, living or dead. Thiel had never been unobservant.

Still... ‘That’s what I’m here for. That is literally what I’m here for, you idiot,’ he said, and laughed.


	23. Same Person

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If there’s one thing Konrad Curze and the Night Haunter can agree on, it’s that they both want the same person.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guilliman/Curze, early in the AU, PG-13, split personality/identity issues

Konrad Curze was very good at making himself unhappy. He caged away the monster, but he also wrapped himself in chains. Morality, social expectations, things a good person was supposed to do or not do, things you were supposed to take for granted. He wanted things he thought he wasn’t supposed to, wasn’t allowed to, and had to fight moment by moment to keep the monster inside when what the monster wanted was what he really wanted.

The Night Haunter didn’t feel the weight of any of that emotional baggage. What it wanted, it did. It enjoyed itself. It was playing a game with the galaxy, for entertainment and to win. It was justice. No complications. No consequences or worry about them, because there was only the moment. Besides, there was very little that could impose consequences on a primarch or stop one.

What it wanted was blood and screaming. Its sheer misanthropic hatred of all that lived made that a symphony to its ears. Then everyone would _shut up_ and it wouldn’t have to hear the buzz of their minds all around with their constant petty venality and excuses.

Really, they all should have been impressed by how many people he _didn’t_ murder everyday. Even when he wanted to. Even when they _deserved_ it.

 _Not Roboute,_ Konrad claimed. _Different, better, mine._ Konrad loved him, wanted him, soaked in him like water in the desert--his presence, the sound of his voice, the touch of his hands, the steadiness at the edge of his mind. Still there was always that little voice that Roboute would tire of him or of humouring his weakness, that he would realise how much better he could do, that the other shoe would drop and he’d find out what Roboute really wanted from him. He could either keep worrying, keep up the distance completely and he couldn’t do that. He wanted to. He wanted to say _I love you, I’ll murder anything that tries to hurt you, I’ll give you everything_ , but he...

The monster agreed in some ways. Roboute was different, not just as a primarch, but because of Konrad’s whole mess of emotions. It didn’t hate him. It found him... interesting. It wanted to play with him, like a cat with a mouse, rather than the all consuming hate and rage that led it to slaughter.

It thought Konrad’s reservations and mistrust were more likely to be right than not and liked to remind him of that, but it didn’t care as much. When (if) Roboute broke Konrad’s hearts, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men wouldn’t be able to put Konrad back together again. Then he would stop trying, stop pretending, and the Night Haunter could do _everything_.

Until then, it was still simple. Konrad wanted him so the Night Haunter did too, no romance or interest in anyone else’s feelings in its way, just desire.

It was fun to sneak kisses even if it was batted away most of the time. Roboute was uncomfortable and that was funny, and wary enough to treat it like an enemy. Only sensible since everyone was an enemy, some just more cowed than others or too dead to ever be a threat again.

It liked to play with him, like a cat batting a mouse back and forth. Didn’t even have to break his legs first, because noble Guilliman wouldn’t try to run. Konrad’s movements were always jerky, but this creature made each step into a lunge. It was violence and hunger made flesh.

‘Go away and give him back.’

‘No,’ Night Haunter said, going in towards Roboute’s neck and getting held at arm’s reach. It bit his hand and licked at the blood, but Roboute hardly flinched and didn’t let him closer. ‘I see no reason why I should.’

Just a bit too little sleep, too little food week after week over too long and it eventually added up until the cage doors were so brittle they could just

snap.

‘I can think of many. Leave him.’

‘Or what? Will you hurt me ‘til I do?’ it purred. ‘What else are you going to threaten me with?’

‘Don’t think I won’t hurt you because you share the same body.’ Roboute’s hands tightened to try to hold it in place.

‘Will you? He’ll remember. Will you tip your hand and show him you’ll hurt him if he does something you don’t like?’

‘I don’t want him to remember hurting me either, or for him to think I won’t stop him from doing things he doesn’t want to do.’

‘But he does. Or, should I say, I do.’

‘You’re wrong in your assumptions there.’

‘Oh, what’s that?’

‘I don’t think you’re different people.’

Night Haunter laughed. ‘Good ploy. Now we have some privacy where he won’t remember.’ Not that anything would go wrong with Konrad’s eidetic memory, he would simply unconsciously shy away from anywhere too close to here because he couldn’t deal with processing that.

‘I’ve been thinking about it. Do not misunderstand me. You are everything he does not want to be, and he locked you away because he chose not to. You are unusually disassociated from the rest of his personality, but you are a set of impulses everyone has.’

‘The cold administrator wants to hunt and tear them apart with his bare hands and taste the blood on his teeth?’

‘Yes. Sometimes. But I don’t, because I don’t want to more. Being vengeful is _easy_ , but it’s a bad reason to send men to war. I’ve chosen not to do what I feel is wrong, and so has he. That’s why he doesn’t want you.’

Night Haunter grinned. It didn’t care about morals or ethics and had no investment in winning an argument about them. It just wanted to make Roboute uncomfortable, to make him feel guilty or unsure as he sought to justify himself. Everyone justified himself, _I was right, I had to, Someone else would have if I didn’t_ (Night Haunter’s was _Because I wanted to_ and _Trying to do otherwise is futile._ )

‘Killer of worlds. As long as you did it with regret rather than glee in your hearts. Do the dead care, I wonder, or would they have rather lived?’

Roboute was angry now, Night Haunter could see it in the tense of his muscles and the pulse under his skin. What he said, though, was, ‘Don’t try, monster. You’re no Angron. We left because we had been wrong.’

‘Such a monumental error.’

‘I am a primarch. You say we cannot deny our natures. I believe our nature is this: that everything we do, for good or ill, is by on a grand scale. When we are wrong, worlds burn. Billions, trillions likely, die, or reduced to lives of pain, loss, and meaningless. Yet, even if the galaxy would have been better off without us, we exist and must do our best.’

Roboute had the look on his face he got when he was thinking quickly and intensely, even for him, running through theoreticals and applying practicals by the hundreds every second.

‘Do you want me to say it? I will. The Emperor was wrong in many ways, and we did wrong, both in obeying him and because of our misguided beliefs. I have done things that I now believe were wrong. Many of the compliances were wrong. We destroyed much that was good and worthy in the name of tyranny.

‘Not all of it--there are regimes that need to be pulled down and people who need to be stopped from preying on others. I don’t disagree with everything you’ve said, or we’d have nothing in common. But being a monster for the sake of that which needs done? No. We have more power than that. You have me and I have you. We can do better. We can do it right, without compromise. I seek peace. I will kill if I see no other way to prevent the deaths of others, but with regret and reluctance in my heart. Maybe you will call it hypocrisy, but it matters to me.’

‘So Lawful Good.’

‘I wrote the laws. I could rewrite them. That means the only person I’m answerable to is myself. What being lawful is about is refusal to compromise. Therefore, I must know my own heart and own mind, and what I consider to be good and what evil, and make decisions with my eyes open. I must protect my people, all of them, and treat every life as if it is that of someone I know and love personally, then make decisions on their behalf that will cost some their lives anyway.’

‘How can you love him knowing what he’s done? You’ve heard how they died? How they pleaded for their lives and eventually just for the pain to stop? Knowing how much he enjoyed it? Do all those people he killed not matter to you because he’s your brother? Because you want him? Forgive him anything because they didn’t matter as much as he does, or do you agree that they _deserved_ it?’ The monster bit as its tongue as it talked, remembering the taste of blood and wanting more of it.

‘I saw the inside of his head, remember. I can understand, I can accept, I can love, even that which I can’t forgive. I can admire him for what he tried to do and what he built from nothing. I can see the goodness in him, the righteousness. Justice is personal, for it to be true, about who someone has chosen to be, not guilt by association on a large scale.

‘I can also say he was wrong in methods, and lost his way, and I disagree with him. He tried to harness you to do what he thought had to be done. He was wrong; you can’t be used. You can’t be used in degrees according to someone else’s will; you destroy everything you touch, including him. I can stand here and offer him another path and support him in his choice to walk it.’

‘Pretty words for the dead. Plenty of people have offered philosophy for how things _should_ be while he ate their children.’

‘I’m not perfect and never claimed to be. I’m not a saint, I don’t belong on a pedestal. So love is something selfish. So I too find suffering easy to ignore when it’s happening to strangers I don’t have to see or know. What is justice? More killing will not bring back the dead. We must live for the future, and choose how to live the rest of our lives since we are here.’

‘You can’t protect everyone like that. You are weak. Those who sin will do so again.’

‘I know I can’t. I will fail over and over and others will suffer for it. Yet I will protect what I can, every time. The world isn’t as cruel as you make it out to be.’

‘How do you justify everything you’ve seen that contradicts that?’

‘Love. Truth. Faith. I do not deny the existence of evil, so don’t deny the existence of good.’

Konrad thought the monster thought only about violence. It would freely admit it _usually_ thought about killing, but it was more than that. The monster didn’t do evil for the sake of evil. It did evil because it enjoyed it. Because of the righteousness of it. There were all manner of vices that existed that it had never indulged in; not because it resisted temptation, but because it didn’t find them tempting, or remotely interesting. It did the things Konrad wanted to do but wouldn’t, because of reasons or it would be wrong or some such restraint of another. Wanting to lash out, to make them pay, make them suffer, keep them from ever hurting anyone with their malice and their greed and their pettiness ever again was the background noise of his life, and when he was Konrad he usually didn’t unless he could give himself an excuse.

The situation was unprecedented, admittedly. Konrad wanted to kill most people, most of the time. He pre-emptively hated and distrusted people far away he hadn’t met yet. At best he found people less annoying than most, or more easily cowed and tamed. Liking someone, loving someone, to this degree not something that fit into his worldview. The entire rest of the galaxy might be in one category to him, but Roboute was in another.

Night Haunter was just a dark mirror. Only a reflection, nothing new. It was Konrad Curze without restraint, without reason, without justification, without the chains of not doing things a good person wasn’t supposed to do or want to do. Konrad was afraid of hurting him, but that was experience telling him he was the kind of person who liked hurting people and always had done it before. But even the Night Haunter did not act with complete randomness; it was only that Konrad refused to examine his own motives and emotions closely enough to understand the underlying logic.

Konrad mistrusted Roboute, couldn’t believe in something that seemed too good to be true without wanting to poke and prod and find the imperfections and betrayals beneath. Konrad, even in the darkest depths of his hearts or in momentary flashes of irritation that he didn’t really _mean_ even at the time, really and truly did not want to kill Roboute. So Night Haunter didn’t either.

Simple.

So the Night Haunter loved him. So the Night Haunter kissed him.

‘Can you stop me from fucking you without hurting your boyfriend?’

‘No.’ Roboute’s fingers tightened on him with deliberation more than passion, but tighter than he would hold Konrad. The grip was a threat. That wasn’t right. He should want the monster outside, believing he was safe. Shouldn’t want to keep it here, to be trapped with it. ‘You and me. You think there’s a theoretical I’ll let you hurt me rather than hurt you. Do you think that exists for anyone else under my protection while I’m here to stop you?’

No, it didn’t. It had met him. Honestly, it wasn’t half as interested in anyone else as it was in Roboute. It wondered if it could make Konrad’s gentle lover get rough. It wasn’t tentative and easily led like Konrad was, and Roboute wasn’t as indulgent of the monster. It wanted Roboute to try to stop it, but not succeed. It wanted, it wanted, it wanted.

‘Tire me out enough and I’ll crawl back to my den to sleep. He wants to throw you down and despoil you and make you as dirty as him and he hates himself for it.’

‘Sex isn’t dirty, whatever your planet taught you. I’m not ashamed of wanting him.’ There was a slight hint of the embarrassed blush Roboute was prone to, but no hesitation or wavering in his voice. ‘I want him to be safe and happy more.’

It knew about wanting. It allowed itself to be distracted with games, but it did fully intend to take what it wanted. It didn’t have any of those pesky ‘Should I? Should I not?’ steps between wanting and doing. Wanted to make him squirm and scream and...

Roboute held its head in place and kissed it gently despite Night Haunter’s attempts to bite back, then carded his fingers through its hair. ‘I love you.’

He was dangerous because he made it want to feel feelings, Konrad feelings. Wanting to have someone was easy. Wanting someone to be happy and to burn everything that might ever threaten them was the kind of complicated it didn’t handle. It couldn’t think--it was immediacy, animal impulses, raw emotions. _I would do terrible things for you._ ‘That’s what people always say when they want to fuck for free.’

Roboute didn’t get defensive or back down. ‘If you want me, I’m here. If you want me to stop, I will. Whatever Konrad remembers of this, he has nothing to be ashamed of, because I said yes and meant it.’ His touches were light, soothing. They made Night Haunter fidget with stopped-up energy.

It wasn’t hesitant in taking the initiative. It ground its hips against him. Its claws tore bloody stripes in Roboute’s chest through his robes. It pushed him into his coach and loomed over him.

Roboute didn’t flinch and didn’t back down, and let the Night Haunter do all that without losing a fraction of his control. As he was pushed down, and he reached up and pulled the Night Haunter to him just as firmly.

‘I love you. I believe in you. I won’t look away no matter what I see, no matter what happens. I love everything about you, even the parts of you that you hate, though I support you in wanting to change. Even if I had to kill you someday, I won’t look away, because I love you.’

It might not have sounded reassuring to anyone else, but Konrad thought, _Thank you._ He wouldn’t have believed him in statements like _That will never happen_ or _I’ll never give up on you._ What comforted him was knowing someone would stop him if he lost himself.

Roboute couldn’t have made a monster fall in love with him, because that would be stupid, but the fact was Konrad Curze had fallen in love with him and the monster was one in the same.

It was frustrating how even being firm he managed to be gentle. He was holding it tightly enough Konrad would have been having a panic attack, but not tight enough, Night Haunter thought. It should hurt, the bones of its wrists grinding together until they broke. But Roboute wasn’t doing that, wouldn’t do that. Still trying to stop it without hurting it. Trying to kiss it softly even as it bit him back. He wouldn’t meet violence with violence because he was weak (in love), and it made Night Haunter want to scream with conflicting emotions and kill until they went away.

Why would he do that when he knew it was a monster?

Because that was the choice he had made, to make love to a monster and in doing so declare it human, because that which was worthy of love could not by definition be a monster.

With his lover beneath him, smiling and satiated and radiant as surely as he was bruised and bloody and well-used, the Night Haunter couldn’t fight Konrad rising to the forefront of their mind again, because Roboute was something he wanted to come back to. Roboute had said he loved him again and again without fear or lies, until Konrad could almost believe he had nothing to be ashamed of for what he had just done to him.

With the future silent, he could hear himself think, and be Konrad and not the monster.


	24. Psychic Troubles

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ‘Sevatar has psychic troubles’ isn’t quite as useful to say as 'Sevatar is a psychic trouble.’ Thiel deals.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sevatar/Thiel, PG-13, while living together

The headache hit Aeonid Thiel like a powerfist crushing his skull, and he had no idea why.

He considered. Was he in combat? No. He was on the _Nightfall_. Everyone was ignoring him. The sensors in his armour informed him, when he inquired with a blink-click, that his hormones that had cascaded in automatic response to that. No sign of why his body had randomly misfired, just the secondary consequences of that.

 _Ah,_ he realised. _I am under psychic attack._

With the sharpness his combat hormones granted him, he glanced around. There was no reason any enemy psyker would need to be within his line of sight, but he could determine how generalised the attack was.

There was no panic around him, no screams or clawing at eyes. Specific then. Why? Why him? There would be negative consequences if he died, but there were better targets. If the Imperials launched another attack on the heart of Ultramar, he would not be at the top of their hit list, and besides there were Magnus and the Thousand Sons in system.

One of the Atramentar shook his head. Another shuffled his feet, a gesture never casual in terminator armour.

 _Ah,_ he concluded. _Sevatar._

Pushing the pain aside, he went over to the nearest terminator. ‘Vox whoever’s with Sevatar.’

The man (what was this one’s name? Sistin) moved his head minutely as he spoke to someone. Then he voxed Thiel on his armour’s internal systems. ‘He had a seizure a minute ago.’

Theoreticals: This could be an external attack or an internal problem. It was centred around Sevatar. (He could see two other people he knew to have psyker talent who seemed unaffected.) Whatever the cause, it was bleeding over onto those closest to the First Captain.

Practical: ‘Get--’ No, Apothecary Ahriman was too busy. His primarch needed him more. Not until he had more information and knew if he was absolutely indispensable for victory. ‘Get Valzen. Get him to the Apothecarium, but keep it quiet. Come on.’

The Night Lords didn’t take his orders as a general statement, but just now they made an exception. _Someone_ needed to give orders and they sounded like good ones. They were Atramentar. They weren’t going to be stubborn when their captain was at risk.

He swapped to the Atramentar private channels as they walked. He wasn’t a member of their brotherhood, but they tolerated him at their edges to some extent because Sevatar had put him there. Some reported symptoms they were having too--headaches, dizziness, seeing auras and hearing scattered thoughts, and their confusion about it. All asked after their captain. ‘I’m working on it,’ Thiel said amidst the vox chatter. That was not sufficient to quiet them, but it was accepted without him being told to shut up.

Valzen did not bother to look up at Thiel as he walked in, but did volunteer, ‘Physically, there is nothing wrong with him that won’t heal. He’s having a seizure approximately every forty seconds. The Geller fields are up at full power. No one senses anything but the Atramentar.’

‘So it’s him?’

‘Most likely.’

Thiel sighed. ‘Make him comfortable. I’d prefer he damage as few of his remaining brain cells as possible, should he ever decide to use them. I’ll figure something out.’

Valzen and his orderlies saw to their work. They hadn’t needed him to tell them how to do their job. Yet, they trusted him. He was an Ultramarine. An _Ultramarine_. Surely that meant he would succeed.

About the only thing he’d done in life that Thiel was proud of was being decreed worthy of becoming a Space Marine. People had told him they had been mistaken ever since. But he refused to fail the man who had chosen him and he had chosen in turn, the man who needed him.

Extracted from his armour, Sevatar didn’t look remotely like he was asleep. He seemed peaceful when he slept, when Thiel held him at least. Right now he looked like he was having a seizure.

Thiel mopped a wet cloth across his brow as he alternately sweated and shook with chills. Antsy, fidgeting, how unsuitable for a Space Marine. The Atramentar that Valzen hadn’t kicked out of the Apothecarium didn’t say anything.

Think. He had to think. He had to ignore the pain in his head. No, wait. If Sevatar wasn’t under the influence of anything external, then why was Thiel being attacked psychically? There was only one plausible source.

It had to be him, then. Thinking Night Lords were weak-willed or not aside, they had _lack of mental stability_ written into their gene-code. He didn’t.

Thiel concentrated on the pain. The specifics of it--the sharp stabs in his temples, the pressure in the bridge of his nose and under his cheekbones, the dull ache at the back of his skull. He owned the pain and isolated it from himself.

Then he stripped off his red helmet and gauntlets, took Sevatar’s hand in his tattooed ones, and imagined poking that ball of pain inside his mind as forcefully as he could.

It rebounded like a boot to the gut. He staggered mentally but stubbornly refused to fall. _Sevatar!_

Another attack. From behind, like a cat pouncing on its prey and going for the back of the neck. He imagined a shield on his arm as he spun, emblazoned with the symbol of Ultramar.

_Sevatar, it’s me. Don’t you dare ignore me._

He sensed recognition from the dark, painful thing. In his mind and Sevatar’s rose the shared memories of all the hours over the last few years they had spent together, Thiel talking and Sevatar listening, drinking him in. Yes, Sevatar knew that voice, that mind.

_You’re hurt, Sev. Come on, let’s get out of here. Follow my lead, damn you._

Even an animal understood that if it hurt here, you should go somewhere else.

They were in their quarters--Curze’s quarters--but they were wrong, too large, there certainly hadn’t been a sparring ring there yesterday, the way dreams were wrong. _We’re inside my mind,_ Thiel reasoned. _And this is where we go together._

Sevatar was there too. He didn’t quite fit his outline, crackling with shadow and electricity. His mouth was not so much a grin as a slash wider than his face.

He looked a monster. Thiel put his hands on his hips and said, ‘Wake up. You’re hurting yourself.’

‘I do that. Maybe I want to hurt you too.’

Sevatar swung his glaive at Thiel, who blocked with a powersword he imagined in his hand. A fine pugio appeared in his other hand as he spun into a counter-attack. He wasn’t a psyker, but he wasn’t an idiot. The most important elements of mental combat were will and creativity anyway.

‘Liar. You lashed out at your allies, not your enemies. Hurting us was only a side effect. You reached for us because you panicked. Sevatar, the sociopathic loner, asking for help.’

Thiel was an exceptional fighter, even among the Legiones Astartes, but he wasn’t on Sevatar’s level and never would be, just like Sevatar would never be better than Sigismund. They had sparred regularly their whole acquaintance, so he could hold his own, but he couldn’t count on winning through force of arms. Time to change the playing field.

Sevatar stumbled as the floor became quicksand. Thiel got a bone-cracking punch in that left the lenses of his helmet shattered and leaking blood.

Still, he could see Sevatar watch him, see that Thiel was unaffected by the illusion of poor footing, and adapt. He tossed missiles at Thiel with his mind--rocks, bolt rounds, falling girders from above. Thiel imagined shields and refused to stagger under any of the impacts. His shield was his honour, his duty, his purpose, and these darts would not touch him.

He made himself faster, as fast as he needed to be, as fast as he could think, and covered distance by removing the space between rather than crossing it. He forced the attack on Sevatar, getting too close for him to put his glaive to its full use. It cut a jagged gash into his thigh, but he got a much more solid hit on Sevatar’s chest with his pugio, slicing through armour, rib, and one of his lungs.

‘Why shouldn’t I? You’re mine, Aeonid.’

Thiel was distracted a moment by the possessiveness of it, the unselfconscious selfish want, and something he unconsciously shied away from naming or acknowledging, and took a solid hit from the haft of the glaive that cracked his chestplate and clavicle.

He repaired himself with a thought, not so much healing, which he was no expert in, as returning to his idealised mental image of himself. ‘Yeah, I’m yours.’

Sevatar came in for another attack, and Thiel dropped his weapons. They dissolved into smoke before they hit the deck. He stood still but dignified, at parade rest. He held the gaze of the murderer before him unflinchingly. Not trust. Not resignation. Surrender. Choice.

 _Did you really think I would give less than I promised?_ he said in his own mind. _Did I not say my life was yours?_

The chainglaive came to rest at his throat, the blow pulled at the last possible second. He could feel its sharpness under his torn gorget, the trickle of blood from his neck that would have instantly clotted in real life but he allowed to drip down the blade.

Sevatar pulled back, eventually. ‘I do learn new tricks whenever I spar with you, but I don’t think I’ll employ that one. I do prefer your method of using this world to Ahriman’s, though.’

‘Awh shucks, I love sparring with you too, Sev.’

Sevatar imitated Thiel in healing himself, and Thiel wondered if he really understood what the method constituted. It was--Thiel imagined, but this was his mind--not just becoming hale and hearty, but filling those broken places with pure ideation. Becoming a little more the person he wanted to be, the person he imagined himself as. He wondered if Sevatar knew he looked more real, more like himself in the real world, than the manifestation of his damaged mind.

‘There are easier ways to ask me to work off steam with you. Now you’re going to have to endure being fussed over by your mother-hens in terminator armour.’

‘I have no idea how to wake up,’ Sevatar said matter-of-factly.

‘Hm,’ said Thiel. He wasn’t the psyker here, but magical theory was intuitive--almost by definition, how it seemed like things should work was how they did. ‘I do. I will save the day once again.’

Sevatar rolled his eyes, and Thiel willed himself awake, which was easy for him.

He wondered how long had passed, and concluded not long enough to change anything important. There was Sevatar, there were the Atramentar standing sentinel, the _Nightfall_ wasn’t on fire.

Seeing no reason to second-guess himself, he leaned across Sevatar and kissed him on the mouth.

Sevatar didn’t respond at first, then his lips moved clumsily, then, as far as Thiel could tell, he returned to his body to get his mouth to move the way he had intended it to. Some of the Atramentar wolf-whistled, just to be helpful.

‘I knew you were good for something.’

‘It is ironic I’m better than you at what should be your thing, not mine.’

‘I’d trade you.’

He’d take it if he could. Better for operational efficiency. Better to spend his pool of sanity points than to continue to drain Sevatar’s depleted allowance. Better because of the natural human instinct that didn’t want to see someone he cared about hurt. ‘Settle for listening to me.’ He caught the Corona Nox that one of the Atramentar tossed him out of the air and put it on Sevatar’s head. ‘And wear this.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thiel is such a fairytale princess. because he's not a psyker but he quickly and instinctively understands how magic works. and remembers those children's stories that say you succeed by being kind and patient and clever. so he does.


	25. Vacation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thiel and Sevatar go on vacation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sevatar/Thiel, sfw, post-wedding

‘We deserve a vacation.’

‘We need to get someone to feed the cat while we’re gone,’ Thiel said immediately.

‘I didn’t mean leaving right this moment.’

‘Yes you did.’

Sevatar shrugged. ‘I’ll let the cat out and tell our parents, and you do the research. It’s hardly fair they got to put us through so much shit and then go off on honeymoon. They’re back, so we should bugger off.’

‘I’m not arguing with you! No, wait, I am arguing with you making me do all the work. Sev, wait!’

*

They ended up travelling by Land Speeder, a compromise between his initial impulse to take two separate bikes and Sev’s to take a Land Raider.

‘I have the perfect thing,’ Sevatar said and two minutes later he had the Ultramarine vehicle blaring Nostraman death metal from its vox. For once Thiel regretted being able to understand the language, or it would have merely been unpleasant noise and screaming. Thiel rolled his eyes and resigned himself to shouting anything he needed to say, and Sevatar grinned, but seemed to be genuinely enjoying himself, tapping his fingers as well as taking in Thiel’s discomfort.

The wind felt good in his hair when he took off his helmet, the hills of rural Macragge spread out before them, the sun rising behind them.

‘Campaigning makes me forget how big planets can be. Drop in near some population centre, kill a few leaders or strategic placements, then leave. But we could fly for weeks and see a whole lot of nothing.’

Sevatar grunted, but Thiel could track the subtle movements of his helmet, watch him watching the grackles on fence-lines. He turned up the music, as if unaware that the quiet he was hearing was that of absence of minds around him the way they would be in Macragge Civitas or on the _Nightfall_. Thiel grinned.

*

They looped back around and reached the ocean a few hours later, around midday. Thiel explained, ‘This stretch of beach is restricted access because when they were landscaping it a few years back, they accidentally scooped up sand from where the Legion used to do aquatic training a century back. So be careful of unexploded ordinance. I’d hate for you to step on a landmine.’ Sevatar laughed. ‘Anyway, there’s a popular tourist destination a few kilometres south, though more so in the summer than now, so we’ll have some privacy without being totally cut-off.’

Abandoning their Land Speeder near the ecological station Thiel had found in his research (the students who often occupied it being up a river inland for some sort of fish spawning natural event), they abandoned their armour in the sand as well.

There weren’t such things as swimming trunks in their sizes, and their fatigue bottoms would get waterlogged and annoying and make this feel like training. So they were naked when Sevatar tackled him into the water. The cold was invigorating, not icy but the warmer jet stream from the tropics didn’t reach this far north this time of year. The water was salty and briny compared to the filtered and recycled water of a spaceship, but that gave it character and made it interesting, in Thiel’s opinion, like flavouring it with fruit or syrup. Eventually he had to bite Sevatar to get him let go so he could surface again and gulp in new air.

Then he threw a jellyfish at him, Sevatar blinked in confusion through the see-through creature covering his face and leaving acid stings behind, and Thiel jumped after it to wrestle him under the breakers.

*

‘I’m not sure I’ll survive. Tell Tovac he can have my skull collection. Valzen is welcome to dissect my corpse to study the cruel and unusual way I died. Vanek may want to duel you over my spear, but whichever of you wins can keep it.’

Thiel let the door swing closed behind him, his arms full of boxes of pizza and his other purchases from town. ‘Dictating your last will and testament?’

‘As I die a long and lingering death, I have nothing better to do with my time.’

The amount Sevatar could complain was inversely proportional to how much discomfort he was actually in (which, joking aside, also reflected a deep unwillingness to admit to weakness, and Thiel knew perfectly well that was warranted in the presence of Night Lords). Still, Thiel amused himself slapping him on the back and moving his hand up to pet the back of Sevatar’s hair. Sevatar winced and hissed in response, and Thiel grinned.

‘I admit, I have never seen such a bad sunburn in my life.’ He’d noticed the early warning signs of it earlier in the evening, but Sevatar’s normally white skin had gone an impressive lobster red while he’d been out shopping. _His_ skin had the sense to tan to a healthy, warm gold. He retrieved a value-sized bottle of gel from one of his bags.

‘Why did you get so much lube? Going to take advantage of me in my infirmity?’

‘It’s aloe. “For external use only,” the label says.’

Sevatar made a pleased hum at Thiel’s tattooed hand rubbing the cool relief into his back and sprawled boneless across the floor, submitting to his ministrations.

(It made good lube too.)

*

‘If you think I’m going back out there, under the fiery death orb, again, you have something coming.’

‘That’s fine. Sun’s up: you take a nap, I have tactical simulations.’ Thiel waved a dataslate absently. ‘We can train on the beach and swim again tonight.’

‘Tactical simulations.’

‘Tactical simulations.’

‘That’s Pokémon Adamantium.’

‘I’m an Ultramarine.’

*

‘If you can wait to watch the fish slowly drown on dry land, you can wait for me to cook them.’

‘There’s entertainment and then there’s food.’

‘Your seagull friends will enjoy the entrails if you let me fillet them.’

Sevatar rolled his eyes. The effect was somewhat ruined by the fact it happened behind the largest, tackiest pair of rhinestone-encrusted sunglasses Thiel had managed to find, under a broad straw hat against the morning sun. Thiel didn’t look up from what he was doing with a bonfire and an industrial-sized tub of barbecue sauce.

+Mob him,+ he suggested to the gulls, helpfully.

‘I swear to science...! Get your birds off me or I’ll roast them instead.’

*

‘You have billions of bacteria in your intestines and I can hear all of them,’ Sevatar told him matter-of-factly.

‘Go back to sleep. We’re still on Macragge, not hundreds of lightyears from civilisation. You can’t be going crazy--crazier--from the quiet in your head this soon.’

Sevatar snorted, already more of a snore.

*

Thiel couldn’t help but laugh breathlessly as he and Sevatar raced along the beach at a dead sprint. Even without their armour, they were too heavy for the shifting of loose sand to put them off balance. No, it was the pit-traps and the landmines they had avoid while luring each other into. Sometimes they set them off just for the concussive waves of explosion to toss the other to the side, heedless of real danger in their game.

Sevatar laughed to, approvingly, as if to say _Look at how adorably sneaky and devious my Ultramarine is._ Thiel glowed with it, and ran faster, determined to win.

*

‘Got everything?’

‘Am I keeping the sunglasses? Of course I am. But I should be the one asking you that.’ Sevatar leaned against the Land Speeder and showed every sign of planning to put his bat winged skull helmet on without taking them off.

Thiel rolled his eyes. Yes, he had been the one to call the Legion serfs who would show up soon to clean up after them from how thoroughly they’d trashed the place.

He took a last look at the sun setting over the sea, and threw an arm over Sevatar’s shoulder. Kissing him on the cheek, he asked, ‘Did you enjoy yourself?’

Sevatar was frozen against him. Thiel could almost hear the cogs turning in his head, as he tried to figure out what this gesture meant and how he was expected to respond to it. Finally he drawled, ‘I suppose you don’t bore me, so that was the best I could hope for between wars.’

‘Love you too,’ he said, the words coming easier each time he said them. Then he pulled his helmet on and locked it in place. ‘Let’s go home.’


	26. Treason

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thiel is a very sensible person about recent political changes and has no idea why everyone else is so upset with him, as usual.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> gen, sfw

‘How do you feel about being a traitor?’

The other Ultramarine flinched, which didn’t surprise Thiel or he wouldn’t have asked the question.

‘We’re not traitors. We fight for Ultramar. We fight for Guilliman.’

‘To the Imperium,’ Thiel specified pedantically. ‘You remember, that place we used to fight for? Just last week? And for the previous century?’

His fellow sergeant glared at him. ‘It was not worth following. Our primarch showed us the way.’

‘So you’re pro-treason. Hey, I’m not saying I disagree with you.’

‘Sergeant Thiel,’ Captain Taerone cut in, looking to restore order among his subordinates before Laronius got too occupied hitting his brother. ‘Consider if I want to know why you’re being even more obnoxious than usual or if you should just shut up.’

That had been a stupid order. Aeonid Thiel had never resisted sticking his foot straight up his throat in his life.

‘As Lord Guilliman said in his _Justifications for Secession_ : “Many shall call us traitors and we will accept this condemnation for the sake of our principles. Loyalty to an unworthy cause is treason to humanity, and this treason we rank higher. So we shall be traitors.”’

‘Yes, sergeant. You’re not in trouble for… using the word, but for being so aggressive about it.’

‘But that’s the thing. Theoretical: No one, especially not the noble and stalwart Ultramarines likes being called a traitor. It is an accusation our enemies will hurl against us to hurt our morale and open us to doubt. Practical: we should desensitise ourselves to it.’

Thiel could see perfectly well that they were not perfectly free of doubt or fear--yes, call it what it was. Their primarch had upended all they had fought for, all they had killed for for so long. There was no shame in it, in his eyes, but it was a weakness that needed addressed. They would have needed to be automata to feel nothing, or degenerates with no true loyalty in the first place. The hypnoconditioning resisted the idea of either his primarch or his Emperor being wrong, yet one of them had to be.

‘Though your idea is not entirely without merit,’ his captain’s voice suggested he was making a great and reluctant concession, ‘your practical is denied. We are the proud Ultramarines, as you say so flippantly. When we use terms like secessionist, we do it not out of reluctance to face a hard trust, but as a reminder of the rightness of our cause. We have broken one oath, but we will not break any others. We will not degenerate into rabble. We will be noble still, not those who rejoice in the name traitor time after time.’

‘But--’

‘And don’t let me hear you lowering coalition morale, sergeant. The people of Ultramar need to know we are doing the right thing and their loyalty should remain with our lord and primarch, as he remains loyal to them.’

‘Good thing the cult of Roboute Guilliman has always been stronger in Ultramar than Emperor-worship.’ Realising, as usual, that he had gone too far (and that had been out loud), Thiel added, ‘I’ll go see ot the loading of the company Rhinos while I think about what I’ve done.’

‘I almost wish we were the Imperial Fists, so I could have that boy flogged,’ Captain Taerone commented to himself as Sergeant Thiel preemptively consigned himself to punishment detail that had never made a dent his captain had seen in his red-helmeted skull.


	27. First Meeting

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Aeonid Thiel was no stranger to dressing-downs._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> following from a [story](http://absurdfact.tumblr.com/post/52263134877/more-no-nails-au-everyone-finds-out) of absurdfact's about the morning after Guilliman and Curze's first time, Thiel/Sevatar pre-slash, PG-13

Aeonid Thiel was no stranger to dressing-downs. He was a connoisseur of them, if anything. The training-sergeant barrage of insults at a shout. The stern declaration of ‘I’m not angry, just disappointed.’ The icy venom telling him he didn’t deserve to be on the Emperor’s chosen, let alone a son of Guilliman. The earnest attempts to figure out _why_ had had gone against regulation, because information was victory, so surely he could be kept from doing it again. The listing of regulations, the reading out of the appropriate punishment detail from the Legion guidelines.

He had, however, never gotten reprimanded by a Night Lord before, so he was curious. It would be annoying to come out of the situation permanently maimed, which gossip suggested was not unlikely, but like all censures before, he would take it and move on.

He had heard First Captain Sevatar had been brought in because his own Atramentar terminator company had been at the heart of the brawl, and since he was already there he was being stuck with the Ultramarines and handful of Astartes from other Legions who’d been dragged in due to proximity too. More efficient that way. It would probably just be a dressing-down. Not political otherwise.

‘So I finally get to the one who started it all.’

‘I was defending my primarch’s honour.’ Wait, he was supposed to not be arguing back. ‘But I should not have escalated the situation and I accept responsibility.’

A scar on Sevatar’s cheek jerked into what he guessed might be a smirk. ‘You were offending by the suggestion your primarch sucks cock like a champion.’

That had not been the specifics, but Thiel rolled his eyes anyway. Then he contemplated whether Nostramans even knew what that gesture meant. Hopefully not. ‘Actually they were implying he was bad at it and I was offended.’ Wait, no, not what he was supposed to be saying. ‘Anyway, two consenting adults can do what they want, and I don’t want to know.’

‘So why’d you bring your brothers into it, sergeant?’

‘That was for me, not my lord. Your Legion only fights when you think you can win, right? Well, I didn’t fancy being pounded into a pulp by a squad of terminators.’ Saying that out loud made him see his folly. He should have just taken the beating--or died--rather than inconvenience anyone. Selfish. Coward. No discipline. It would have been a stupid thing to do. No, he shouldn’t think that way. Dishonour. DIshonour on you, dishonour on your squad, dishonour on your whole Legion.

Sevatar made a gravely sound that might have been a chuckle. Or a growl, but his body language didn’t support that hypothesis as well. ‘If you were smart enough to escape a beating then you deserve to get away with it, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t know or care how you Ultramarines usually do it. Make yourself scarce, sergeant. I don’t have time for you now. No hard feelings.’

‘Yes sir.’ He saluted instinctively. He considered thanking him but bit it back, unsure of the situation. Had that been sarcasm? What part? What had he actually meant?

‘How did it go?’ one of his brothers asked, inspecting Thiel to make sure all his limbs were still attached.

‘Lovely. We gossipped, then he told me how grateful he was for getting him away from his usual paperwork.’ It occurred to him he might not be entirely outside the range of the first captain’s enhanced hearing. Whoops. Better to not show the weakness of visibly backtracking, though. ‘Have fun.’


End file.
